Know Your Quarry
by The Sophisticated Shut In
Summary: AU. A teenaged Fry and Leela compete in their world's version of the Hunger Games. "She has to stop thinking like this. The Games begin in two weeks' time. She can't afford to think like this."
1. Chapter 1

**Title: Know Your Quarry**

**Story summary: An Alternate Universe fanfiction. Teenage Fry and Leela compete in a Futuramaverse version of the Hunger Games. **

**Ships: Fry / Leela, mentions of Amy/ Kif. **

**Warnings: Obviously this story contains violence. Rating should stay a T throughout, though, as this site doesn't seem to mind so much about violence and the sexual content in this one is very mild. **

**I've done my best to keep everyone as in-character as possible, although there will be some differences, owing to the situations I've put them in. **

**Knowledge of the Hunger Games trilogy will give you an advantage when reading, but you should be able to get by without it. I should probably also state that Nixon, in the Futuramaverse, is a natural fit for the role of President Snow. I'm working off the fictional, head-in-a-jar version though, and I don't own either of them, so please leave any defamation lawsuits at the door. I could only pay you in noodles and fanfiction anyway.  
**

* * *

Leela is four years old when Nixon wins the Earthican presidency. She doesn't pay much attention to it. It's politics, after all, and it's to do with the surface, a place Leela has never seen and is privately convinced doesn't exist.

Besides, she's building a xylophone out of discarded tin cans, and at four years old that's really more important.

Dimly, she registers the fact that her parents talk about this man with frowny faces and hushed voices, as if they think maybe he can hear them even underground. Her father says Nixon is preying on the anti-immigrant prejudices of the electorate. Her mother says she doesn't like the way Nixon uses the media.

None of this means anything to Leela, so she quickly forgets all about it.

* * *

When Leela is five years old, Nixon makes good on his election promise and constructs a giant "alien-proof" fence around the Earth. He electrifies the perimeter, so that illegal immigrants get fried trying to sneak in. The actual frying is broadcast live on television, on a specially-designated channel that broadcasts 24 hours a day.

That same year, Leela's father begins to work longer hours in the sewer, for a smaller pay packet. He comes home late at night, caked in grime and so worn-out it's all he can do to flash Leela a smile.

Nixon is coming down hard on the mutant population, he says. He and Munda argue about it in strained whispers, when they think Leela is asleep. Munda always says the same thing – that mutants have rights – and Morris always reminds her that they don't. Only official Earthican citizens have rights, and Nixon has made it clear that when he says "official Earthican citizen" what he really means is "unadulterated human".

* * *

Leela is six years old when the consequences of Nixon's anti-immigrant policy really begin to be felt by the surface. The healthcare and agriculture sectors are the first to buckle under the strain, but higher education suffers too, as colleges struggle to cope without fees from immigrant students. It quickly becomes clear that to Nixon and his cronies, every immigrant is an illegal immigrant, and none of them are going to be given Earthican citizenship. Ever.

Desperate to distract an unhappy electorate, Nixon devises The Citizenship Games: a televised fight to the death. The rules are simple. The participants must volunteer. None can hold Earthican citizenship already, and all must be under the age of eighteen. They will fight each other in a specially-designed arena until only one remains. The Victor.

At first it seems like madness – what kind of kid would volunteer for that? And then it all becomes clear. It's the reward. The lone victor of the Games wins Earthican citizenship. Not just for a year – for a _lifetime_. And for their _entire immediate family_. The concept is wildly popular. Nixon's more xenophobic supporters relish the chance to watch a bunch of aliens fight to death, like the frightened animals they see them as. Moderates like the veneer of fairness the contest offers. They talk proudly of how generous the reward is, and skirt around the issue of the twenty or so dead kids the contest will produce every year. After all, they say, no-one's _forcing_ these kids to sign up. Detractors are mysteriously silenced.

Later that year, Nixon's stay in office is extended indefinitely. It's an emergency measure, he says, to counter the current "crisis". No-one points out that he is the one who caused the crisis in the first place.

No-one points out much of anything, anymore.

* * *

A projector is sent to the sewers, so the whole of the mutant settlement can watch the Games every year.

Every year, at least one mutant teen signs up.

Every year they die, without exception. Death after death after death. If their fellow contestants don't kill them, the deadly arenas do. Her parents try to stop her watching, but it doesn't make any difference. The Games hold a sick fascination for Leela. She watches every year as mutant kids are stabbed and strangled and beheaded by their fellow tributes, and as they are gassed or blown up or incinerated by traps in the arena. Some of them simply sicken or starve to death, and in a way those deaths are the worst. Those tributes hold on longest, and she can see it in their faces as their hope drains away. It seems so much crueler than a quick death. Watching those deaths unfold, down in the gloom of the sewer, all she wants to do is to reach through the screen and snuff out their lives herself. She thinks they'd probably thank her for it.

Surface people, she decides, are sick and bloodthirsty, and Nixon is the worst of all.

* * *

The explosion happens on her tenth birthday.

Leela is in the schoolhouse. Her mother is going to make her mushroom pancakes later, with five different types of fungi, and after that Raoul is coming round to play them some songs on his home-made guitar. (The xylophone taught her that she herself has no musical aptitude whatsoever, but Leela likes to hear other people play. And Raoul is actually pretty good.) She's wearing a lumpy knitted cardigan and a pair of spit-shined black leather shoes Munda insists are smart. They pinch her toes. It's funny how these stupid, insignificant little details stick in her head. Even years later Leela finds she can't think about the explosion without also remembering the itchy cardigan and the too-tight shoes, and the list she was making in her head of all her favorite songs.

She is too far away to hear the blast properly – it rumbles like far-off surface thunder – but she feels it. They all do. It shakes the floorboards under their feet, and the teacher doesn't even attempt to stop the class running out of the building. Every one of them has a family member working in the sewer system. A gas explosion or a pipe collapse means someone they know is injured at best, dead at worst.

Leela can't look at her classmates. Can't think about her stupid birthday anymore, or her too-tight shoes. All she can think about is her father. She runs all the way to the Eastern Pipeway. There is a stitch tearing at her side and her head is spinning, but she ignores it. Ignores it all. The Pipeway is the only thing that matters . . . until she reaches the familiar rusted entrance and finds it gone. In its place is a wreck of mangled iron. Raw sewage laps over her shiny black shoes, seeping through the gaps in the wreckage.

Munda is clutching at the foreman, begging for information about her husband. Leela hears their conversation as if from a distance. Most of it is muddled, but certain words stand out. _Crushed_ is one. _Drowned_ is another. And _sorry_, of course. _Sorry_, over and over again. Munda sinks to the ground all at once, like her insides have been sucked out.

Leela just gets foggy. For a long time she doesn't know where she is, can't hear anything except the blood rushing in her ears. Later they tell her she lost her mind. They say she screamed and threw things. They say she scratched and kicked and even bit anyone who tried to calm her down. Leela doesn't remember any of it, and she doesn't think it matters.

All that matters now is her mother, who no longer eats or sleeps, no longer really smiles, and never again seems truly whole.

* * *

Her father is dead and buried under tons of surface filth, but the surface offers no compensation, and soon enough Leela and her mother begin to starve. Neighbors help them out, but there is never enough food to go around. Before long Leela can trace the outline of bones beneath her skin. Her stomach aches at night and if she stands up too fast she gets dizzy.

Munda works two jobs, battling her grief, but it's not enough. At eleven years of age, Leela leaves school for good and becomes a sifter. Her job is to sift through muck on the first level of the sewer and retrieve anything of value. The pay stinks and after ten minutes Leela stinks too. It doesn't help that she has terrible depth perception. She lives in fear of missing something important and losing her job.

As it turns out, her fear is misplaced. The thing she should have been afraid of was illness.

It creeps up on her mother gradually, leaching the color from Munda's cheeks and slowing her movements, making her cough at night. She starts to lose weight again, like when they were both starving to death. Her forehead feels hot to the touch. Her breath rasps. One night she coughs and coughs until bright red blood spatters the sheets and Leela suddenly realizes: her mother isn't going to get better. Not without help.

It's an infection, the doctor says. A surface medicine called penicillin could cure her mother, but it can't be found in the sewer. Leela knows she could get down on her knees and personally beg President Nixon for it, but he wouldn't give it to her. No surface person would.

Her mother is going to die. Like her father, only worse, because this death won't come all at once. It will drag out over weeks, maybe even months, until Munda is too weak to move. She will end up like those children in the Games, any hope of survival draining away as her body collapses in on itself. And Leela will have to watch.

The day her mother can't get out of bed, she makes up her mind. It's a long shot, suicide to even attempt it if she's honest, but it's the only thing she can do. She's going to go to the surface, and steal the medicine her mother needs.

* * *

She chooses her manhole with care, opting for one a long way from the city center. It's situated next to a big gray building she thinks might be a prison. There are letters picked out in wrought iron above the gate.

_Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium,_ she reads. Huh.

She hides in the storm drain for hours, but waits until night falls to make her move. She has a hooded jacket, and there will be kids around. That means she might be able to blend in better than she'd hoped, and it means there might be a medical bay or a sickroom, for the kids. It might even contain more than just the bare minimum required to save her mother's life. A kind of excitement fizzes up in her as she bolts from the drain and flattens herself against the wall. Her heart is pounding in her throat.

Inside, the building is cold and featureless. There is a thick layer of dust and owl droppings on the floor, and what little furniture she can see is shabby and faded. It's not what she expected. This is the _surface_. It's supposed to be better, isn't it?

She can hear steel doors clanging in distant corridors. The sound spurs her on, gives her the courage to climb a staircase and check out a few empty rooms. She finds an office, a closet full of ancient brooms and mops, and a long bare room full of metal bedsteads. The room opposite is the one she wants. The sickroom. She slips inside - still drunk on her own daring - without pausing to listen at the door.

Her heart almost stops.

She's not alone.

The room is a shorter version of the one she just looked at. There are four metal-framed beds in it. Each is surrounded by a long, peach-striped curtain. Three of the curtains are pushed back, but one is half-drawn and in the foot-high gap between curtain and floor Leela can see a woman's severe pointed shoes.

She claps a hand to her mouth and immediately wraps herself in the folds of the neighboring curtain, trying her hardest not to breathe. If she is found here . . .

Amazingly, the woman doesn't notice her. She doesn't even seem to hear the door open and close. She's in the middle of a furious tirade against someone Leela can't see. Apparently the someone is mentally deficient and a drain on the state, and brought this injury on himself. At long last the boy she is talking to is given a chance to mumble his agreement and offer an apology. The woman waves it away and clacks off. She sweeps right past Leela without seeing her. This near-miss must lull Leela into complacency, because she lets herself take a breath at last – and almost jumps out of her skin.

"You can come out if you want," the boy says. "I know you're there. I can see your shoes."

His voice is a lot stronger now that the shouty matron woman is gone. He doesn't sound scared or angry. Just curious.

Leela swallows. Feeling like she has no real alternative, she steps forward and pulls back the curtain.

The first thing she feels is a wave of relief. Her discoverer is just a kid, like her. He can't be more than twelve. In fact, twelve is a generous estimate, because he looks pretty scrawny. He is small and pale, with dark blue eyes and shockingly bright orange hair. Leela has never seen hair that color, not even on a mutant. It's the color of carrots or toxic waste, and it sticks up in every direction. The boy is wearing a barf-green sweater over a peach-striped hospital nightshirt. One of his legs is encased in hard white stuff Leela has no name for. A winch is holding it up at a thirty degree angle, which explains why the boy didn't just get out of bed and investigate her presence himself. The impairment relaxes Leela a little. If she has to overpower him, it will be a lot easier like this.

She stands in front of the boy, waiting for him to react to the fact that there is a mutant at his bedside. If he makes any attempt to scream or attack her, she is ready to act. There is a lamp on his bedside locker she thinks she could brain him with.

But he only stares at her.

"What's with the eye?" he asks at last. "Are you an alien?"

Leela finds her voice.

"No."

The boy stares some more.

"It's a really big eye."

"I know."

"I mean, like . . . _really_ big."

"I was born with it," Leela snaps. "I'm a mutant."

"Oh," the boy says. Then - "I'm Fry."

"What?"

"That's my name," he explains. "Philip J Fry. But most people just call me Fry, because they use last names here. Like in a prison. Everything here is like a prison. There's even bars on the windows. What's your name?"

Leela blinks.

This doesn't make any sense. She just told him she's a mutant. He should be freaking out right now, and she should be making a run for it. But he isn't, and she isn't, and so she finds herself answering, in a kind of daze.

"Leela. Turanga Leela, but Turanga is a family name. Everyone calls me Leela."

"Snap!" Fry grins.

His smile is as shocking as his hair. It shines out like a fog lamp. It's bright and beaming, and Leela can't remember the last time someone smiled at her like that. Maybe her parents, when she was a baby and everything wasn't so exhausting. Maybe.

"I'm a mutant," she repeats, desperate to steer this conversation back on course.

It still doesn't have the desired effect.

"Are you an orphan too?" Fry asks, like this is somehow the more important question.

"No," Leela says, baffled. "My father is dead though. And my mother is dying."

Her voice sounds stiff and uncaring, even to her own ears. But she can't open those floodgates. She can't go back to that day at the Eastern Pipeway, to the flood of emotion that drove her crazy. It's safer to be factual about these things. That way, maybe they won't hurt as much.

But Fry's smile has dimmed at her words.

"I'm sorry," he says, sounding for some reason as if he actually _means_ it. "Can . . . can you do anything?"

Any minute now, Leela thinks, her eye is going to boggle right out of her head.

"She needs medicine," she hears herself say. "Penicillin. We don't have it in the sewer. I was going to steal it."

Fry nods, as if this is a perfectly reasonable plan. He points at a door Leela hadn't noticed yet. It's cut in two halves, like a stable door. The bottom half is locked, but the top is swinging free, and she could easily jump it.

"They keep all the medicine in there," Fry informs her. "In a big white box with a red t on it."

He's not lying. In under five minutes Leela has a bottle of red and yellow pills stashed in the pocket of her sweater. It rattles when she moves, and she keeps feeling like an alarm is about to go off, like sniffer dogs are about to chase her down. She needs to get out of here.

She wants to run, right now. But instead she finds herself hovering awkwardly at the foot of Fry's bed. She feels like she owes him something. Or something.

It's confusing.

"What happened to your leg?" she asks eventually. It seems only polite.

"Oh, I fell off the roof," Fry says. "I'm an idiot."

"What were you doing on the roof?"

"I went up there on a dare." He dips his head, looking momentarily miserable. "I just wanted the other kids to like me. They call me Stupid From The Stupid Ages, and Mega-Dunce. And Carrot-Top. Which isn't fair, because I can do tons of cool stuff."

"Like what?"

Why does she keep talking to him? Leela can't figure it out.

"I can finish a Rubik's cube," Fry boasts. "And I can do a septuple head spin, and I've seen every episode of Batman ever. That's cool, right? I'm cool!"

Leela shakes her head.

"I don't know what any of that means," she confesses. "But you seem nice. For a human," she adds quickly. "I don't know why they don't like you."

Fry smiles again. This one is different. It's smaller. Shyer.

"We could be friends," he says hopefully. "If you want. I could teach you how to do a septuple head spin, or a Rubik's cube, or, or . . . anything you want! And you could teach me what mutants do for fun. And come see me sometimes. I get . . . I get lonely, sometimes."

He fidgets nervously. When he touches her hand, Leela notes that his palm is hot and sticky.

"Please? I like you," he mumbles, and suddenly her face is hot too. She snatches her hand away.

"We can't be friends."

He calls after her - "Wait!", maybe or "Don't go!" - but Leela doesn't stop to listen.

She runs as fast as her legs will take her, and she doesn't look back.


	2. Chapter 2

She tells everyone she found the bottle of pills while sifting through the muck on Level One, and if they don't believe her, they can't imagine any alternative. Half the pills go to her mother and the other half go to the mutant medical center, to help somebody else. In recognition of her achievement, Leela is promoted from sifter to muck-raker. It's cleaner, and it builds the muscles in her upper-body, so she doesn't complain.

Her mother recovers, but is never as strong as she used to be. She is pale now, and she moves slowly, is more easily winded. She won't survive another illness. Not in the sewer. But it doesn't matter, because Leela has a plan.

One night she does the thing she has been putting off since she was ten years old, and goes through the trunk containing her father's belongings. She finds his fishing rods and convinces Mouth Mutant to take her out on the lake at weekends. It turns out to be something she's good at. Before long she can go out in his boat alone, hook any fish she wants and even harpoon squid. Twice a week she practices wrestling with her friend Moose, and every morning before work she runs laps around the village, pushing herself until her breath tears and her muscles scream.

Fighting. Survival skills. Stamina.

She is going to train as best she can, and when she turns sixteen, she is going to volunteer for the Games. She's going to volunteer, and she's going to _win_.

* * *

Leela keeps her plan a secret, because she knows it would only worry her mother. Munda already worries about her too much. She asks why Leela doesn't have more friends, why she isn't interested in any of the boys in town, if she really _has_ to push herself so hard to keep fit. The questions are easy enough to ignore. Everything is easy to ignore, except her mother. The tiny tickle of a cough, the smallest change in her coloring . . . Leela is attuned to anything that could signal oncoming illness. She can't lose her mother. She _won't_.

There is hardly room in her head for anything except her mother and her preparations for the Games. Friends are a distraction. Boys would be worse. Letting herself slip beneath peak physical fitness would be the biggest disaster of all. When Moose tries to ask her on a date one year, she laughs out loud. She tells him she admires his guts, but if he thinks she's the type to date he doesn't know her at all.

That same year Moose signs up for the Games. He's strong enough to survive the elements, and determined enough to kill. Leela didn't know he was planning to volunteer, but it makes sense, and for a while she actually thinks he could win.

Until the interviews. Until she sees Amy Wong.

Amy Wong is fourteen years old. She is small and plump, with short black hair and terrible acne, but none of that matters. Because Amy Wong is human. Her admittance in the Games causes uproar. Technically she qualifies – she doesn't hold Earthican citizenship, after all – but there has always been an implicit understanding about the Games. Humans don't enter. Only lesser species get put through the trauma of a televised bloodbath. So what the hell is Amy Wong doing onscreen?

Rumors fly, above and below ground. The Wongs were a prominent Martian family, said to hold more wealth than Nixon himself, but now Leo and Inez Wong are dead under mysterious circumstances, and their assets have been seized. People say they spoke out against Nixon, and were killed for it. People say Nixon was threatened by their wealth, and killed them for it. People say little Amy Wong was talked into volunteering for the Games by scary men in sunglasses. They say she's a lesson to the rest of them.

It makes sense to Leela. If the Wong girl dies in the arena, she becomes a warning to Nixon's opponents – _this is what happens if you speak up against the government_. If she lives, it will be because humans support their own. It will be a reminder to aliens (and mutants too, Leela supposes) that the odds are never in their favor. That the cards can always be stacked against them. The game can always be rigged.

It makes her sick to her stomach.

The interviews are a mixed bag. Moose does well. He plays up his brute strength (a smart move, because sponsors like to bet on a winner) and talks about how he could contribute to Earthican society if he won. He mentions pro-wrestling and logging in Alaska as his big dreams. He laughs with smarmy Zapp Brannigan about the quality of surface beer. He does well.

Amy Wong is up next. She seems small and scared, and no amount of styling can make her look anything other than dumpy onscreen. Brannigan doesn't even bother to leer at her. Amy spends most of the interview blinking at the cameras as though blinded. She talks about how she loves miniature golf and ponies. Apparently she won championships back on Mars. Her favorite food is strawberry choco-nut ice-cream, and her favorite color is pink. Or maybe yellow. She can't decide. When Brannigan asks her about her parents, she starts to cry.

Normally, Leela would take one look at this girl and write her off. _Normally_, any tribute who displayed this kind of weakness wouldn't last five minutes. But this is no normal tribute. When Amy spouts inanities, the human audience chuckle and "ahhh" like it's adorable. When she cries, they tear up immediately.

Amy might be a weakling, but it's pretty obvious she will want for nothing in the arena. She's going to have sponsors queuing around the block.

This prophesy is proved true once the Games begin. Food, water, matches, a flashlight . . . Amy only has to express half a longing for something and it becomes hers. Sponsors _adore _her. On one occasion someone even sends her strawberry choco-nut ice-cream.

But that's not the worst of it. The sponsors' generosity wouldn't have helped her if she'd been murdered at the Cornucopia the way Leela expected. But she wasn't, because Amy Wong is smart. Beneath her naive exterior is a frighteningly efficient mind. Amy knows she's easy prey for any tribute with an ounce of strength, so she avoids the bloodbath at the Cornucopia. She can afford to do so because she knows sponsors will send her whatever she needs to survive. Amy might look like a blob of pampered nothing, but she knows how to play the game.

Even worse, this year's arena might as well have been specially designed for her. It's an obstacle course, set out like a giant game of Mouse Trap. The tributes are snared by a succession of inventive booby traps - dropped cages, rolling boulders, swinging blades - but Amy manages to navigate them all. All those years of miniature golf, Leela guesses. The arena itself takes care of most of her competition, until Amy only has to defeat Moose and three Careers to win. She hides behind a rock pile and for a while it looks as if her plan is simply to wait until the alliance fractures, and hope her enemies pick each other off.

It isn't.

Instead Amy Wong writes HARPOON in the dirt. It arrives at night, and from there it's game over. Sweet little Amy Wong wanders up to the Career on guard, the harpoon hidden behind her back. Her knees are knocking, and the alien must not recognize her as a threat, because before it has time to react Amy has sliced its throat open. Blue plasma gushes out over the ground. The alien is dead before it can issue a warning. From then on it's easy. Amy simply wanders up to the remaining three kids, who are asleep on the ground. The point of the harpoon sweeps across their throats. They convulse wildly. Moose even wakes, his eyes wide and fearful, but there's nothing he can do to save himself, and there's nothing Amy Wong will do to save him. She just crouches by him, watching his life drain away with terrified, too-bright eyes.

The sound of the cannon bleeds into the sound of fanfare, and when Amy stands up, she does so as the victor of the eighth annual Citizenship Games.

* * *

In two years time, Leela will be in Amy's place.

It's the promise she made herself – the promise she made her mother, in the privacy of her own head – and she won't betray it now. No matter how horrible the Games get. No matter how scared she is. Nothing scares her more than the thought of losing her mother, and if they stay in the sewer, she _will_ lose her. This is what Leela tells herself, whenever her resolve starts to falter.

During the day, she doesn't need to tell herself anything. She can work and train and stay focused on her goals without fear.

But at night . . .

She's started to dream. It's hard to say when it begins, exactly, but soon enough she wakes in a sweat every night, her heart racing.

She dreams of her father, crushed and drowning. He dies over and over again in her dreams, and so does her mother. Munda wastes away, gets sicker and sicker, until she takes one final death-rattle gasp and she's gone.

She dreams about the tributes from eight consecutive Games, and the ways in which they died. She sees Moose over and over again, trying to scream through the ragged wound in his throat. She sees the way she laughed when he tried to ask her on that date, and the hurt she pretended she couldn't see when it flashed across his face.

Sometimes though, among all the dying, she dreams of something else. She doesn't know why. Maybe it's because he tried to help her, or maybe it's because he really sounded sorry when she told him about her mother. Maybe it's because he is the only proof she has that good actually exists in the world, and that idea haunts her more than all the horror.

Because sometimes she dreams about Philip J Fry. Sometimes she can feel the warmth of his hand again, and the heat of her cheeks when he smiled at her, and sometimes she wonders what would have happened if he hadn't been stuck in that bed when she ran away. Maybe he would have run after her.

But then she stops herself, because no matter what happens, she can't afford to think like that.

* * *

She submits her entry form on the eve of her sixteenth birthday.

It doesn't seem real.

Leela lies awake that night, staring at her bedroom ceiling until it starts to blur. Eventually she thrusts her head under the pillow and lets the nightmares take her. Moose and her father and her dying mother haunt her dreams, and the next day, she feels as if she is sleepwalking through her own celebrations.

* * *

The Peacekeepers come for her a week after that. Their gleaming white uniforms stand out starkly against the filth of the sewer. From a distance, with helmets throwing dark shadows across their faces, they look like ghosts. But when they surround Leela to escort her to her one and only goodbye, they grip her with fingers like iron.

Munda is first confused, then horrified when she understands what is happening.

"No!" she screams. "Leela, baby, no! Why would you do this?"

"For us. For you, Mom."

"No." Munda looks like she is in physical pain. "You can't! You withdraw your name right now! That's an order!"

Leela feels something twist inside her. It's sharp and it hurts.

"I can't," she says softly. "The contract is binding the moment you sign the application. I agreed to do this, Mom. I can't back out now."

"Time's up."

A Peacekeeper shoves her in the back. Leela sees distress flash across her mother's face, but Munda is either too smart or too scared to speak up.

"My baby," is all she says, in a tiny, broken voice.

"Mom!" Leela gasps. The Peacekeepers start to drag her away. "No, wait! I need more time! Mom!"

The harder she struggles, the tighter they grip her. It wasn't supposed to be like this, she thinks desperately. She was supposed to be cool and calm. She was supposed to make her mother see what a good idea this is, how it's the only real option. How none of it matters anyway, because she's going to _win_.

Instead she fights back tears as Nixon's goons haul her off.

"Mom! Mom, I love you!" she screams. "I'm coming back! Mom!"

Hot tears course down her cheeks, and the door slams in her face.

* * *

Leela dries her face as soon as they leave the sewer. She doesn't want to look weak in front of any other tributes – or worse, sponsors.

The Peacekeepers deposit her in the cargo bay of a sleek black hovercraft. The Gamemakers must intend to collect all the tributes at once, because there are 24 seats inside, and three of them are already occupied. Leela slides into the fourth and buckles her seat belt.

The craft takes off again.

For twenty minutes they fly in uninterrupted silence. The only sound is the rattling of the chassis and the whir of the propellers. Leela and her companions don't talk, but she sizes them up as best she can anyway.

The first, a hulking pink amoeba thing, is probably female. The surface of her flesh ripples aggressively, and she glares at anyone who makes eye contact. A Career, Leela decides, or a would-be Career.

The second is a tall gray Native Martian. He has spindly limbs and his bare chest is patterned with livid white scars. His gaze is fixed on a point somewhere above Leela's head. It never wavers. The message he is sending is all too clear – his fellow tributes are too far below him to merit his notice. Leela marks him as a threat.

The third tribute is no threat at all. He is a stocky, mud-green Omicronian about a foot shorter than Leela, who is sniffling pathetically into his cloak. Whatever drove him to volunteer, he obviously regrets it now.

A horrible, gelatinous green blob gets picked up next. He waves his six feelers in a threatening way, and grins nastily. Definitely a Career. Leela knows a bully when she sees one.

The blob is followed by a reeking Decapodian boy with holes in his shoes, then an Amphibiosan girl who has a slight, unthreatening build, but a narrow, cunning face that hints at hidden strengths. Leela disregards the boy and makes a mental note about the girl. She could be one to watch out for.

They touch down again, the door opens, and the Peacekeepers shove in a skinny, humanoid boy. He is wearing a shabby green coat that must be at least third-hand, and an oversized woolen hat. When the Peacekeepers push him inside he stumbles, and they kick him in the small of the back. He barely reacts. Obviously this kid is used to life kicking him while he's down.

Leela wonders what species he is. From here he looks as human as she does. When he sits down next to the sobbing Omicronian she leans forward, trying to get a better look.

She sees a pale face. Blue eyes. An overbite. It all looks a little bit familiar, though she can't think why. The boy buckles his seat belt at last and settles back, tugging off his hat with one hand.

Underneath it his hair is brilliant orange.

He isn't humanoid, Leela realizes. He's _human_. He's _her_ human. The only one she's ever known, the only one she ever thought she might like, if she wasn't so scared. Philip J Fry, from the orphanarium. His voice echoes in her head. _"We could be friends." _

_Friends_.

She wanted to be, once.

But now he's here, in the Games. A _human_. Leela doesn't know if she should scream or cry. A human in the Games is a death warrant for every other tribute. His strengths and weaknesses don't matter. The odds will be skewed in his favor. Sponsors, the audience . . . even the Gamemakers themselves will want him to win. Whatever chance Leela thought she had, she just lost it.

She looks at Philip J Fry's pale, nervous face, and wishes she could reach across the hovercraft to spit in it.

The atmosphere in the craft has grown thick, as the other tributes come to the same realization as Leela. The only person in the craft who doesn't seem to wish death on Fry is the little Omicronian beside him, who probably couldn't cry any harder anyway.

Leela has given up hope of him ever shutting up, but to her amazement he does - when Fry sticks out a hand and says brightly: "Hi. I'm Fry. What's your name?"

There is a moment of confusion, where the kid just stares at Fry all wobbly-eyed. Then he gives a tremendous sniff and actually stops crying.

"I'm Jrr," he mumbles. "Of the planet Omicron Persei 8."

Fry nods.

"Cool," he says.

His voice has broken since Leela last saw him, but it's still not what anyone would call manly. Nor is he, if she's honest. He still looks scrawny and underfed – more so than Leela herself, or most of the kids she knows in the sewer. The orphanarium can't have been good to him. His strange, instinctive kindness seems to have survived it though.

"You seem sad," he tells Jrr. "Wanna talk about it?"

Jrr wipes his nose on his cape.

"I don't want to be in the Games," he whispers. "I only volunteered to make my parents mad. My dad hates humans. We had a big fight and I said I was going to run away to Earth and never see him again. I thought he'd stop me," he whines.

"Guess he didn't, huh?"

Jrr's face crumples.

"No. He said I was a disappointment of a son and killing would do me good. He said if I don't conquer my enemies I'll disgrace our whole planet and he'll disown me."

"That's rough," Fry sympathizes. He reaches out awkwardly and squeezes Jrr's thick shoulder. "Your dad sucks."

"Yeah," Jrr says softly.

He starts to cry again, but Fry doesn't try to talk him out of it. He just lets Jrr sob, and when the boy's cloak is too sodden to absorb any more tears, he silently hands over his hat.

It is at this point that he looks up, and his gaze meets Leela's. Recognition flashes across his face, and he actually starts to _smile_. He opens his mouth, lips moving to form her name, but before he can get it out Leela's glare nails him to the wall.

That scares him into shutting up.

Eventually he seems to realize admitting he has met her before would get her into trouble. Maybe he thinks this is the reason behind her frostiness, because when he figures it out he catches her eye again and essays a small smile.

Leela ignores it.

* * *

The Training Center is the tallest building Leela has ever seen. She feels dizzy just looking at it. It is matte black, like the hovercraft they arrived in, and all the windows are tinted black. Inside, every surface is cool and shiny. Halogen lights glint high above her head, and black marble floors stretch off into the distance. It's all a far cry from the filth of the sewer. Leela knows she is supposed to find it luxurious, but to her this new world is creepy and clinical.

Every tribute has their own suite of rooms. Food and drink will be delivered at their request, the Peacekeepers explain. They can rest tonight, but tomorrow morning they will be expected to report to the basement level for training. Each tribute will then be assigned to a previous victor, who will mentor them for the duration of the Games. As the pool of victors is so small, Leela knows she'll be sharing her mentor with at least one other tribute. But that shouldn't be a problem. She doesn't trust anyone here except herself. She certainly won't be relying on some stranger to get her out of the arena alive.

Her mentor is a problem for tomorrow, anyway. Tonight's problem is simpler: sleep.

Leela can't relax in her quiet, echoey suite of rooms. Everything smells sterile. The bed is huge, and the sheets are pressed so sharply she feels as if she is being smothered when she tries to lie down under them. The food she ordered earlier sits strangely in her stomach. None of it was familiar. She tried to order mushrooms, but they came with pasta and peppers and a white wine sauce, and the pancakes she had for dessert were cloyingly sweet. It doesn't help that she can't seem to shut off her mind. Every time she shuts her eye she sees her mother screaming. The minute she feels herself begin to relax the image of another tribute flashes before her and she tries to picture them dead. In two weeks' time, she reminds herself, she will have to make that picture a reality, or else she's never going home.

It is almost a relief when the knock sounds on her door after midnight. At this point, Leela would welcome a lost Peacekeeper or even a bloodthirsty fellow tribute, if they would tire her out enough to sleep.

She finds herself rethinking her willingness to open the door when she sees who is on the other side.

"Wait up!" Fry cries, when she moves to slam it shut again. He wedges his foot in the door frame. "I just want to talk to you!"

Leela scowls. She has to fight hard to keep her voice level.

"Unless you want to get killed two weeks early, I'd go back to bed."

Fry blinks.

"You wouldn't hurt me," he said uncertainly. "We're friends."

Leela glares at him.

"Friends?" she spits. "What planet are you on?"

"Um . . . Earth?"

"We're not friends, idiot."

"We could be," Fry says. As if it matters. As if it could ever be that simple.

Leela takes a minute, takes him in. A skinny sixteen year old (fifteen year old? She doesn't even know) with rumpled red hair and wide, hopeful eyes. They have him dressed in red and black tribute pajamas the twin of her own, but his feet are bare. He looks cold.

Why is he so hard to hate?

"Ugh." Leela groans. "Get in," she tells him.

She tugs him in by his collar, ignoring his protests.

"Relax. I'm not going to hurt you." She folds her arms. "You wanted to talk."

"Huh?"

Fry looks disoriented, although that might have something to do with the fact that Leela has just pushed him onto her bed, and is now standing over him, glaring. He is a teenage boy, she supposes. His imagination probably runs on the usual track.

"You wanted to talk," she reminds him. "So quit staring and talk."

Fry nods quickly.

"You're mad at me and I don't know why," he blurts out. "And you're in the Games and you're kind of scary now but I still want to be friends. And we have matching pajamas. Do you think we all have matching pajamas? It's kinda creepy if we do. And the pajamas are all silky, I don't like it. It's cold. What's the point of clothes that don't even keep you warm at night? I want normal pajamas."

He yanks at the fabric like it's driving him to distraction. Leela just stares at him. She thinks her mouth might be hanging open a little, but it's forgivable, because Fry has thrown so much weird at her she doesn't think she can process it all at once.

The pajama thing, she decides, is probably just a case of his mouth running away on him. He seems like the type to babble when nervous. The fact that he finds her scary is strangely flattering – it means she reads as a threat to other tributes, which is exactly what she wanted – but his offer of friendship is weird. Tributes don't befriend each other in the Games. They make alliances or form a pack. And they don't call each other scary like it's a _bad_ thing. In the Games, scary is a definite plus.

All of this pales beside his opening statement, however.

"You signed up for the _Games," _Leela says furiously, "and you don't know why I'm mad." When Fry says nothing, she realizes she will have to elaborate. It only enrages her further. "You, a _human_, signed up for the Games. Against me, a _mutant_. And you have no idea why I might be just the _teensiest bit_ ticked off about that?"

"No, I -"

"_You signed my death warrant!"_

The words ring out in the silence. Leela's breathing is ragged, and Fry has gone white.

"I don't understand," he says.

"You're human," Leela says harshly. "This whole system is set up to remind mutants and aliens we're not as good as you. That's the whole point of the Games! It's not about giving us a chance or pretending we're all equal. It's not about giving us hope! It's about making sure hope isn't worth it, because it costs too much!"

What the hell is she saying? Where is all this coming from? The words feel wrenched from some dark, hidden place inside her, and they terrify Leela. They make her wonder what other feelings she's been hiding from herself.

"If we win," she hears herself say, "it's because everyone like us died, or because we killed them, and we have to live with that! If you're non-human and you win the Games it's not because you were strong or smart or . . . or anything you tell yourself! It's because you're a killer. Because you're whatever the Gamemakers want you to be, you're just a piece, you don't matter . . ." She trails off, the fight going out of her. "But I was going to do it," she says softly. "I was going to do it this year, I was going to win. It was going to be worth it to save my mother." A hot tear slides down her cheek. She hates herself for it. "I had a shot," she tells Fry, "and now I don't, because you entered. You're human, don't you get it? The Gamemakers will want you to win, sponsors will want you to win, everyone watching you is going to love you no matter how useless you are, because you're _human_. I should kill you right now."

She doesn't, of course. It's not even a real threat. She's too upset to act on it, and Fry is in a world of his own, still grappling with what she has just told him. He doesn't even seem to notice her last few words.

"You're . . . you're not," he manages at last.

"Not what?"

Fry frowns, like putting his thoughts into words is the hardest thing he's ever had to do.

"Not not as good as us," he says. "Not . . . what they want you to be. I don't know. But I think . . . I think you matter. I think all of us matter, even in the Games."

Leela stares at him. She really needs to stop, but . . . no-one in her entire life has ever said anything like that. Fry must be crazy. The idea that aliens and mutants might be as good as humans, coming from a human . . . it doesn't make any sense. He might as well be speaking gibberish, except that gibberish doesn't spark off hot, angry, confused feelings in the people who hear it. Gibberish doesn't make sense and no sense all at the same time, and gibberish has never made her feel scared the way this does. Like if peacekeepers were to overhear it, they might put a bullet in the back of her head just for listening.

"You have to go," she blurts out. "You shouldn't be here."

Fry nods.

"I know," he says. He hesitates by the door. "I'm really sorry," he mumbles.

The door swings shut behind him. Leela hits the lights off and dives into bed, a ball of terror fighting its way up her throat. She has to stop thinking like this. The Games start in two weeks time, she can't afford to think like this.

She has to be ready, she has to be a killer, no matter what it means . . . no matter how it makes her feel.

It isn't until the next morning, when the hot water in the Training Center shower is drumming down on her forehead, that a new thought hits her – one which has nothing to do with her own fate, or the right and wrong of the Games.

_He shouldn't be here. _

The words have played themselves over and over in her head, from the minute she first saw Fry on that hovercraft, but she still managed to miss it, somehow. Fry is human. Fry already lives on the surface. Fry is absolutely not a Career.

So what the hell is he doing in the Games?


	3. Chapter 3

Leela looks for Fry the next morning at breakfast, but he is sitting on the other side of the hall with Jrr. If she walks over now, everyone will see. The other tributes will suspect her of trying to make an alliance, and the Peacekeepers will wonder what makes a mutant girl think she has the right to talk to a human on the first day of training. So she hangs back, chewing her protein-heavy breakfast and trying to figure out a way to get him alone.

It's harder than it should be.

After that first night, the tributes eat their meals together in the dining hall, and train all day in the basement. They train under the watchful eyes of mentors and Gamemakers, and Leela herself has to be watchful if she is to maintain any chance of survival. She needs to suss out her competition, get to know the other tributes' strengths and weaknesses. She needs to hone her own skills too. She isn't familiar with surface terrain, and there are weapons here she's never even heard of. Most days she hardly has time to note Fry's presence in training before her attention is dragged in another direction.

The Mentors are announced two days into the training schedule. Head Gamemaker Abner Doubledeal lines up all 24 tributes and assigns them each to one of the nine previous Victors. Leela has been telling herself she doesn't care one way or the other about her future mentor, but she still feels nervous as she waits for her name to be called. This is the closest she's ever been to a winning tribute.

The closest she's ever been to a killer.

The Careers are mainly assigned to the most brutal mentors. Leela doesn't know if this is a coincidence or not, but she suspects not.

Elzar is the first mentor to go. He is a brawny, four-armed Neptunian, and the winner of the first ever Games. He is the oldest mentor. His face is worn and scarred, and one of his four arms ends in a stump. He lost it to another Career during his Games. Elzar's winning strategy was brute strength – he hacked fifteen fellow tributes to pieces with a machete. Leela is privately glad she doesn't have to spend any time with him.

Kif Kroker, who won just last year, is the next mentor she can cross off her list. He is an Amphisobian in his late teens, with a slight build and a mild expression that belies a fiercely tactical mind. He won his Games through cunning, getting in early with the Career pack and letting them lord it over him while he undermined them from the inside. He destroyed their supplies and then turned the paranoid tributes against each other, playing on their mutual mistrust until the entire pack was dead. There was only one tribute left after that - a girl from his own planet. They fought bitterly, but he won in the end. He pushed her into an electrified fence and she burned from the inside out. Leela still remembers the smoke pouring from the girl's eyes and mouth. It was such a good death it is guaranteed to show up in reruns every year. Kif gets three tributes to mentor, including this year's Amphisobian girl, and the soft-hearted Omicronian Jrr.

Langdon Cobb is the next to go, and Leela is thoroughly relieved not to get him. Cobb makes her uneasy. She's not sure what species he is. When he entered the Games his consciousness was split between two physical forms. One was humanoid and the other was a four-legged fungal creature that swelled to match his ego. Cobb was deadly, but his Games were dull. No-one could look at his bare face without getting their life force sucked out. He won by sneaking up on the other tributes and removing the hood that covered his face. The deaths were quick and bloodless, and could only be shown from certain angles because of the danger to viewers at home. To make things worse, he won in only three days. The Gamemakers were obviously furious, because they unleashed a wave of toxic rain for the big finale. Cobb's humanoid form was left hideously scarred by it, and his secondary form was completely destroyed. Whatever he is now, he's only half the person he is supposed to be, and it gives Leela the creeps.

"Tributes assigned to Amy Wong!" Doubledeal bellows. The Head Gamemaker has heavy eyebrows and a small squashed face, and sounds like he is announcing sports all the time. Leela dislikes him intensely. "Turanga Leela!" he shouts. "Celgnar An-Or Keeler! Philip J Fry!"

Leela swallows. _Amy Wong_. Her mentor is _Amy Wong_.

She follows Fry and the haughty Martian boy, Celgnar, to Amy's quarters. They stay silent in the elevator, though Leela can feel Fry's eyes on her the whole ride up. They flit back to his shoes every time she tries to catch him at it, but his furious blushing gives him away.

Fry is called in first to meet Amy, then Celgnar. Leela waits in the hall, counting up the minutes in her head. They both average ten or so, and come out looking serious (in Fry's case) and angry (in Celgnar's).

Her turn.

She knocks and steps inside.

"Hi! You must be Turanga Leela! It's so great to meet you!"

Amy's smile is bright and warm. In the flesh she's shorter than Leela. She has dimples.

_The tip of the harpoon snicks against Moose's throat. His hands claw desperately at his neck as he tries to close the wound, but the blood gushes out too fast – a rich red spray that coats Amy's face and neck as she leans over him. The sound he makes - _

Leela reels. Amy's smile flickers.

"Are you okay?"

Leela nods.

"Fine," she whispers.

"Oh, good. Sit down!" Amy pats the seat next to her. "Let's talk."

Earthican citizenship has radically transformed Amy Wong. The fat little girl with acne has been replaced by a glamorous, self-possessed young woman. Exercise or surgery has stripped her of any surplus weight. Her make-up is flawlessly applied – she is all blood-red lips and razor-sharp cheekbones. Black eyeliner flicks up in a sharp V at the corner of her eyes, making her look even fiercer. The strappy sandals on her feet have six-inch heels curved like silver blades, and the red cocktail dress she is wearing (in the middle of the day) clings to her every curve. She looks beautiful and deadly, every inch a killer.

She drops the chirpy act as soon as Leela sits down.

"I'm going to be your mentor," she says, "and I want you to know that I'll do whatever I can to make you win."

"Me?" This is surprising. "What about Fry? And Celgnar?"

"I told them the same." Amy stares at her intently. "I know you can't all win. But you're my tributes. I have to try and save you."

_Save you._ Leela feels a shiver run down her spine. People on the surface usually act like the Games are fun. If Amy wants to save them, it means she admits there are horrors they need saving from.

"So," Amy says briskly. "Let's run through your strengths and weaknesses. I've been watching you in training the past two days, and I've seen your application. Wanna hear what I think?"

Leela nods.

"Strengths first then." Her new mentor sits back and studies her. "You're fit. You have great survival skills, and if it ends up being hand-to-hand combat, I feel good about your chances. You have a pretty good rack too. I can work with that." She shrugs. "If some skeezeball remembers you from the interviews, he might sponsor you later. It's worth a shot."

Leela looks at Amy, at her endless legs and low-cut dress. She swallows. The idea of some pervert human drooling over her in a similar dress makes her want to hurl, but she knows Amy is right. This is how the game is played.

"What are my weaknesses?" she asks. She's not vain enough to think she doesn't have any.

Amy's eyes narrow.

"You're a mutant," she says bluntly. "Mutants don't win. The surface thinks you're inferior genetic scum. You're actually not hideous though," she muses. "Apart from the eye. You might be close enough to human that the audience will like you, if you play it right." She sighs. "But that's your other problem. You're about as likeable as a Martian muck leech."

"What?"

"You didn't know?" Amy rolls her eyes. "Spleesh. Okay, look. Don't take this the wrong way, but you're aggressive and and you're closed-off and I'm not even sure you know _how_ to smile. I don't know what makes a girl desirable in the sewer, but humans _hate_ that stuff. You're too old for the little-sister schtick, so you basically have two options. Sexpot or sweetie pie."

Leela panics.

"I'm not either of those things!"

"G'uh! I know. That's why I said it was a problem." Amy appraises her again. "I'll work something out. We'll get you to talk about your mom in the interview. She's your only family, right? That'll tug some heartstrings. And maybe we just won't let you talk too much on camera. Go for the whole mysterious angle. It could work."

"Okay." Leela feels dizzy. "What else?"

"You need to practice with automatic weapons," Amy tells her. "I know you don't have them in the sewer, but you never know what the Gamemakers are planning. Guns and grenades could end up being all you have in there. Forget about showing off your skills for the other tributes. Just get good with guns, okay?"

This is surprisingly good advice. Leela finds herself taking it on board despite her earlier plans.

"I will," she says.

"Great. Now we need to talk about allies."

"No, we don't. I'm not teaming up with anyone."

"So you don't want to join the Career pack? You're good enough."

"No."

"What about Celgnar? You're both my tributes. I could pool my sponsorship funds if you guys worked together. Get you better stuff. And he's strong."

"No way." Leela shakes her head. "I don't trust him as far as I could throw him."

Amy concedes this point. She might have vowed to try and keep him alive, but Leela gets the impression she doesn't much like Celgnar either.

"How about Fry?" she suggests.

"_No,_" Leela says quickly.

"He's human," Amy argues. "He'll get sponsors."

"No," Leela repeats. "He's . . . he says things."

It's a weak explanation. She doesn't even know what makes her say that much. But to her surprise, Amy nods.

"I know." She looks past Leela, out the window. "Do you know what he said when he first came in here? He said I looked better than I did on TV."

"Well, you . . . you do," Leela says awkwardly. "Hotter."

Amy laughs.

"That's what I thought he meant. But he said no. He said I looked better than before because before, on TV, I looked like there was no-one behind my eyes, and now I look alive again. _Alive again_," she repeats.

She looks distant.

"What did you say?" Leela asks. She can't help herself.

Amy looks back, startled out of her reverie.

"I told him he shouldn't say things like that. I'm a Victor." Her smile is sad and empty. "I've never felt more alive."

* * *

She never does manage to get Fry alone. She keeps trying, but eventually figures out the only way to get around their training schedule would be to sneak into his room at night, the way he snuck into hers. Unfortunately she has no idea which room is his. So she waits.

Two weeks pass.

Leela trains with automatic weapons, as Amy recommended, and feigns interest in the Career pack. She has no intention of joining them, but she doesn't want them to see her as a threat just yet.

In her evaluation, she shows off her speed and strength for the Gamemakers, and they score her an eight out of ten. It's the best score a mutant has ever received, and narrows her odds considerably. Surface people might actually start betting on her now, and if they do that, they're more likely to protect their investment by sponsoring her later on. Celgnar also scores an eight. Fry, to Leela's surprise, scores a six. She wonders what he showed the Gamemakers in his trial. He hasn't displayed any real skills in training, after all. He spent most of his time at the survival stands, learning how to make fires and find food. Still, simply being human wouldn't earn him a six. He must be hiding some useful talent. Leela can't help but wonder what it is.

The interviews air the night before the Games.

The three of them sit backstage with Amy while they wait to be called. Their mentor is wearing a black leather minidress with sharp spikes sticking out of the shoulders. Her lips are blood-red again and her nails have been filed into points. They look like deadly weapons in their own right. She smirks and looks fierce every time the camera pans over her, but away from the prying eyes of the audience she's like a different person. She nervously gnaws her lower lip and fusses over her tributes. For the first time, Leela catches a glimpse of the plump little girl from two years ago, who blathered about ice-cream and ponies in her interview.

Fry is fidgeting with his cuffs. Celgnar seems calm, but the tip of his left shoe is tapping out an irregular rhythm.

Leela tries to ignore it all and focus on the interviews of the other tributes. The angles they take are familiar, tried and tested in previous years. She watches them cycle through crazy, cunning, seductive, bloodthirsty . . . None of it is new. In fact, it all progresses as expected until they get to Jrr. Leela had figured he and Kif might play the cute angle, but the boy surprises her by coming out in a high-necked crimson cape and talking about how excited he is prove himself to his father. He growls for the audience on command, and says he hopes there will be a traditional Omicronian fleem at the Cornucopia this year.

Leela almost buys it until he comes off stage and she sees how hard he is shaking. Celgnar snorts. Amy looks away, but Fry smiles.

"You did good," he says warmly.

Jrr stumbles on his cloak, but he smiles back before Kif pulls him away. Leela wonders if Fry has any idea how much his kind words mean to the kid.

Celgnar is up next. His interview is a disaster. The pride that intimidated the other tributes so well comes off as aloofness onscreen. He won't be drawn about his family, and when the interviewer, Linda, asks him about home, he can barely contain his contempt for humans. Leela doesn't blame him – humans took over his planet and turned him into a second-class citizen – but it makes her worry all the same. She hopes she can be a lot more convincing about how much she loves the surface when they ask her about life in the sewer. When Celgnar comes off he seems fully aware of how badly it went – he stomps back to his suite without speaking to any of them.

Leela is next in the running order.

The lights onstage are bright and hot. She can feel them melting the make-up on her face, and hopes they aren't making her sweat. Amy has her in a long, clinging velvet gown. It is slit up to the thigh and has a plunging neckline Leela had to stick down with double-sided tape earlier in the evening. She's still nervous about it.

She thinks the interview goes well. It's hard to tell because when she's up there, all she can think about is how dry her mouth is and how hard her heart is pounding. The sound of the audience laughing crashes in on her like a tide. Leela has never had so many eyes on her at once – she can barely breathe. She manages to get out something about her mother - how much she loves her and wants to win for her. Then something about how Amy is the most glamorous person she's ever seen and chose this dress for her tonight. She twirls when Linda asks her to, even though it makes her feel a little sick. She remembers to mention what an honor it is to be in the Games. Linda smiles indulgently at that, so Leela supposes she got the tone right, and silently thanks Amy for making her practice.

When she finally escapes she runs smack into Fry. Amy has dressed him in a charcoal gray suit and a dark green shirt. Silk, Leela notes. The collar is crumpled - it must be driving him nuts. The hair Amy spent all evening smoothing into place is mussed again, and there are scuff marks on his shiny black shoes. Close to, Leela can see his nails are bitten to the quick and starting to bleed. He must be really nervous.

"Don't look at the audience," she hears herself say. "It makes it worse."

Fry blinks.

"Thanks," he says hoarsely.

They're still tangled awkwardly together. Fry's hands are on her forearms and hers are on his chest. She can feel his heart thudding under her palm. She flinches when he reaches out to touch her cheek, but Fry doesn't seem to notice. He just holds up his hand, frowning at the pinky-yellow stuff on his fingertips.

"Your face is melting. Is that normal?"

Leela blushes hotly.

"It's cover-up," she tells him. "For my freckles."

"Oh. I wondered where they went. Well . . ."

"Fry!" Amy shrieks. She appears at his elbow, looking panicked. "They're calling you! Get out there!"

"Oh, crap!"

He wipes his hand on his suit jacket and lets go of Leela, stumbling onto the stage. She catches a glimpse of him tugging on his collar again, and then Amy pulls her backstage, where they can watch him on a monitor and discuss Leela's own performance.

Amy tells her she did good, that she came off as humble and the double-sided tape stayed in place. Both things are a relief to hear.

Onscreen, Fry is explaining how a human being ends up competing in the Games. He has no Earth cert, he explains, because he was born -

"Wait, did he just say a _thousand years ago_?"

Leela thinks her eye might boggle out of her head.

Amy nods.

"Oh, yeah. It's a really weird story."

"It's my fault," Fry says. "I was in the city with my parents and I ran off. I was chasing a hamster. I think it was a hamster. It _looked_ like a hamster. I was hoping it could be friends with my guinea pig, but I couldn't catch it." He looks faintly bewildered, as if he still can't quite figure out how he was outwitted by a rodent. "Anyway," he continues, "I fell in this freezer-tube thingy and when I woke up it was a thousand years in the future. And everyone I ever knew was dead, I guess." He shrugs. "I had a great-great-great nephew somewhere, but he didn't want me, so they put me in the orphanarium."

"An _orphanarium_," Linda coos. "How sweet! I expect you learned a lot there."

Fry frowns. By the look on his face it's clear he has never heard the words "sweet" and "orphanarium" in the same sentence before.

"I . . . guess? Warden Vogel taught me how to find valuables in trash, and how to stop the rats eating my socks. Warden Proctor taught me I was mentally deficient and a drain on the state." He appears to think for a minute. "I think I preferred Warden Vogel."

Behind her, Leela can feel that Amy has frozen. The audience don't seem sure how to take Fry's comments about the orphanarium. Some of them titter nervously, like they think he might be joking. Others frown, or simply look confused.

Linda falls into the confused category.

"Well," she says limply, "I'm sure your experiences there have helped mold you into the resilient young man you are today!"

Fry blinks.

"I . . . know I broke a lot of bones?" he offers.

Linda gives up. She flashes him a false, dazzling smile, and decides to pretend she can't hear him.

"Why don't you tell us all about your decision to volunteer for the Games?" she asks. "That must have been exciting!"

Fry shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

"I, um . . . I'm gonna be sixteen in a month. And I don't have an Earth cert. It was the only thing I could think of."

Linda smiles her plastic, overstretched smile.

"But surely you could earn citizenship when you turn sixteen?" she says. "I'm sure -"

"No, I couldn't. I'm not smart," Fry interrupts. "I don't have any special skills. I'm useless, I _know_. They made us do tests at the orphanarium, for career day, and my future career was 'An Ingredient In Soylent Green'. If I don't win the Games, I'll turn sixteen and they'll send me away to the work camps on Halley's Comet. I can't go there!"

Amy sucks in her breath. Linda's smile flickers. The audience are suddenly so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

Leela doesn't understand what's so wrong with what Fry said, but she senses now is not the time to ask. Not when Amy's eyes are riveted to the screen.

"Well, everyone has their place -" Linda starts to say, but Fry shakes his head furiously.

"I'll die there," he states, matter-of-fact. "That's what happens on Halley's Comet. You mine ice all day in the cold, and then you get sick and you die. And you probably end up in a can of Soylent Green. Everyone knows that."

The audience gasp. Linda stares at him, mouth hanging open like a fish. Backstage, Amy has put a hand over her mouth and is whimpering quietly. Whatever she coached Fry to say in his interview, this was obviously not it. This is . . . well, crazy. It's like he stood on that stage and set off a bomb. Leela can't comprehend it. All he had to do was get up there and play nice, do whatever Amy told him to. He's human. The audience want to love him, the Gamemakers want him to win. And he just blew it up in their faces. Leela never heard of Halley's Comet before tonight, but it's obviously one of the Nixon administration's dirty little secrets. The kind everyone knows about, and no-one is ever, ever stupid enough to talk about.

Like the terrible conditions in the sewer, she thinks suddenly. The accident that killed her father, the lack of medicine that almost killed her mother. Leela would never be stupid enough to talk about them on television – to assume anyone up here even cares – but later on, when she is lying sleepless in her bed again, she shuts her eye and tries to imagine herself in Fry's shoes. She imagines that she was the one to shut Linda up, that she was the one to make the pampered surface audience so uncomfortable. Of course, that would also make her the one everyone is now too scared to sponsor, and her the one Amy spent half the night screaming at, but in this imagined reality, Leela finds she doesn't care. Someone spoke the truth for once, and it was her. Even if she dies in the Games, the surface can never take away that one moment when they were held accountable for the things they do. It was brave, she realizes. What Fry did was stupid, but . . . he had nothing left to lose, and he chose to go out fighting the crooked system Leela has hated her whole life.

He hasn't got a hope in hell of winning the Games, she thinks, but he's braver than her.

The thought makes her feel strange, like something inside her has shifted. Like a long-forgotten second Leela is trying to step out from under her skin. She tightens her grip on the blankets and forces her eye shut, pushing the feeling away.

The Games begin in six hours time.


	4. Chapter 4

The tributes are loaded back into the hovercraft the morning of the Games. Strapped into their seats and injected with tracking devices at the start of the ride, they fly in silence.

Leela thinks she might be sick. She made herself eat a good breakfast this morning, on Amy's orders, but she is regretting it now. It keeps threatening to make a reappearance.

They disembark and are shepherded into separate rooms in an underground silo. Each room contains nothing but a chair, a toilet, and some clothes, set up behind a folding screen. In the corner is a launch pad, which will take the tributes up into the arena when it's time. Leela dresses quickly, taking note of the outfit the Gamemakers have provided. Sturdy boots, khaki combat pants and a black shirt with long sleeves. Thick socks and a heavy, knitted green sweater. The whole thing is topped off with a black waxed jacket. Wherever she's going, it's unlikely to be hot. That could be good - she won't dehydrate so fast - but the sweater and jacket suggest potential cold. Not so good.

A siren wails. The sound is high and thin in the sterile room. Leela's stomach roils again, but she forces herself to swallow back the vomit and ignore the burn in her throat.

She can do this. _She can do this_.

Two Peacekeepers appear in the doorway. Their expressions are stony, and they march her to the launch pad without looking at her. The plastic tubing surrounds her with a pneumatic hiss. Leela fights the urge to scream. The tube is suffocating, but she can't be in it more than thirty seconds before a second siren starts, and the pad under her feet begins to rise.

The room falls away and darkness swallows her.

Higher, higher . . .

She glides through the ceiling, through dark layers of thick, oppressive earth . . .

And then dazzling sunlight breaks through. Fresh, cold air hits her, and Leela steadies herself.

_10 . . ._

_9 . . ._

The countdown has already begun. She has to take stock of her surroundings.

_8 . . ._

This year's arena is dry but cold. The ground is stony – gravel, she thinks – and dilapidated buildings line the horizon. It's a city, she realizes. A ruined city. Like the remains of Old New York, but above ground.

_7 . . ._

_6 . . ._

The tributes are still on their podiums. Jrr is on her left side. The aggressive pink amoeba is on her right. Mrrxxs, Leela thinks her name was.

_5 . . ._

_4 . . ._

They are arranged in a semi-circle around the glittering golden mouth of the Cornucopia. It is forty, maybe fifty feet away. Weapons, food . . . everything they need to win is waiting within reach. All they have to do is survive the inevitable bloodbath to get it.

_3 . . ._

Leela tenses.

_2 . . ._

Takes a deep breath . . .

_1._

Without stopping to think, she jumps off her podium and dives into the throng.

Fry is twenty feet away from her, the closest of all of them to the Cornucopia. But he stumbles off his podium and starts to run in the opposite direction, towards the city on the horizon. Away from the fight.

Leela dodges a thrown knife.

On her left Celgnar has found a spear. It lashes out at someone she can't see and comes back coated in blood. There are screams.

A hand grenade lands in the dirt behind her, showering her in shale, but her waxed jacket protects her from the worst of it and she forces herself on.

Closer, closer . . .

Blood fountains over her feet. Something knocks against the side of her head and she staggers, her vision blurring.

She has to keep going. She has to.

She dives into the shadow of the Cornucopia, grabs the first backpack she sees and pulls it on. Her fingers curl around the handle of a serrated hunting knife.

Jrr appears in her field of vision, grappling with a Carcaron girl. The Carcaron clamps her teeth around his arm but he shakes her off easily. He picks up a fleem in one hand and two backpacks in the other. He spins the fleem, staring down at the stricken Carcaron girl – but he doesn't attack. He just looks in the direction of the city, then turns and runs. The girl shrieks in rage, spitting out teeth.

Leela makes to run, but something grabs her ankle. She screams. All around her is blood, blood, chaos, noise . . .

The knife flashes through the air on reflex. It slices through a thick, viscous substance, and a bright pink feeler flops to the ground, oozing fluid.

She runs.

When she looks back, Mrrxxss is battling a stocky Neptunian. One of Elzar's Careers. Mrrxxss is missing a feeler, and the Neptunian is bleeding from a gash on his stomach.

The air is thick with screams.

Jrr is far ahead of her. Bullets pepper his back, but they bounce harmlessly off his scaly hide and then he is gone, out of range.

Leela keeps going. Her head is ringing. Her palms are slick with sweat. _Don't drop the knife, _she tells herself. _Can't drop the knife. _

She feels as if her grip on reality is slipping. The horizon is swimming before her eye, she can barely breathe. Everything is blood and screaming. The boom of the cannon keeps crashing in her ears.

By the time she reaches the cover of the ruined city she is keyed up, terrified. She hurls herself through a doorway, up a seemingly endless flight of stairs, and into a cold and dusty room. There are concrete blocks and broken furniture strewn on the floor, enough for her to barricade the door. She does so quickly, then retreats to a corner. Back pressed against the wall, she desperately tries to regulate her breathing.

She can't. The bloodbath isn't like it is on television. Television couldn't capture the smell of blood, or the awful, heart-pounding confusion she felt in the middle of it all. Practicing in the Training Center hadn't prepared her for the way it felt when her knife slid through sentient flesh. Avoiding the other tributes during training hadn't made it any easier to watch them die.

She lets the knife she is holding clatter to the floor and hugs the backpack to her chest. The images stuck in her head are terrible. She searches her memory for something brighter, something to force them out. Scattered fragments are all that comes to her. Her father whistling on a Sunday morning. Her mother's eye opening after her long illness. The tinkling of the xylophone she made as a child. The sight of her parents dancing round the kitchen when she was very small, before everything got so hard. Fry's shy smile when they were children, and the way his thumb felt when it brushed against her cheek backstage.

Her breathing slows.

* * *

It's dark when Leela wakes. Her fingers and toes have gone numb, and her muscles are stiff. When did she fall asleep? She can't even remember.

The cyclops forces herself to her feet. Her makeshift barricade is undisturbed, at least. However long she spent dead to the world, no-one found her.

_You were lucky_, she tells herself. _You can't afford to drop the ball like that again_.

She makes herself walk back and forth across the room a few times, until the feeling returns to her limbs.

There will be cameras watching her, she knows. Her post-bloodbath freakout will have cost her any sponsors she won at interview. She needs to re-establish herself as a contender, as someone in control.

It has started to rain outside. Heavy sheets of the stuff sleet down out of the sky; dirty gray but still purer than anything the sewer ever threw at her. It's the first night, she reminds herself. The Career pack will be making camp. They'll be tired, and in this weather they won't want to come after her. The other tributes will be trying to make alliances of their own, or familiarize themselves with the arena.

Leela cleans her hunting knife and wedges it snugly into the side of her boot. Then she opens up the backpack she retrieved at the Cornucopia, laying the contents out on the floor so she can assess her haul. There is a large sheet of heat-reflective foil to keep her warm at night, a canister of water (blessedly full), a tub of trail mix, and a packet of buggalo jerky. There are some iodine drops in there too, to purify any water she might find later, and a grand total of three matches. It's not much but it's better than nothing. If she wraps the foil around herself and remembers to eat at intervals through the night, she should be able to make it til morning with just her own body heat to keep her warm. Lighting a fire when she doesn't know the location of the other tributes is a risk she'd rather not take. At least, not yet.

She takes up position by the broken window and chews on some jerky, watching the street for any signs of life.

An hour passes. The rain slacks off a little, and then the Earthican anthem begins to play, blasted out from hidden speakers all around her. A hologram of the flag – Ol' Freebie, what a joke – is projected onto the sky. The faces of the fallen follow it.

This year's bloodbath at the Cornucopia must be some kind of record – Leela counts fifteen dead tributes in total. The Careers mostly made it through, as did Celgnar, Jrr, the Decapodian boy, the Amphisobian girl, and Fry. When his face fails to appear among the dead, Leela lets out a breath she hadn't even realized she was holding. She thinks about Jrr – about the two backpacks he picked up at the Cornucopia, about the way he grabbed that fleem thing but didn't use it. He looked in the direction Fry ran in, then fled without attacking anyone. She wonders if he and Fry made an alliance. She wonders how long it would keep either of them alive.

* * *

The next morning dawns bright but cold, so Leela packs up early and goes hunting for her adversaries. She's not planning to take them on yet, but it won't hurt to know where they are.

It's not long before she tracks down the Career pack. They have set up camp at the Cornucopia itself. The bodies from yesterday's fight have been airlifted away. If it weren't for the bloodstains and the horrific flashbacks just _being_ here triggers, Leela could almost forget the carnage. The Careers have gathered up the remaining supplies and piled them into the mouth of the golden horn. Two of them – Mrrxxss with her oozing feeler, and a short, muscular Neptunian boy - stand guard there now. Brett the gelatinous green bully-blob is arguing with the shark-like Carcaron girl some distance away. The source of the friction seems to be a disagreement over which tributes to hunt down first.

"Mutant Girl!" Mrrxxss hollers. "She _cut_ me!"

"We need to take out that snotty little Omicronian," the Carcaron girl insists. "He's got no stomach for killing but he's tougher than he looks, and he's armed. He nearly got me yesterday! We can't let him walk around like he owns the place. Either he joins the pack or he's out."

"Joins the pack? Hah. In his dreams."

"Yeah, Daddy's Boy isn't a threat right now. We can always deal with him later. I say we get the Martian, then Mutant Girl. I don't trust either of them as far as I could throw 'em."

"And the human?"

"Forget about it, he's toast. Even the Gamemakers won't want to help him now, and without sponsors you _know_ he don't stand a chance. You all saw him in training."

There is an outbreak of unpleasant laughter, and then they start talking about what to eat for breakfast. Leela retreats.

So Celgnar is first on their hit list, then her. Best be careful.

Leela spends most of the morning exploring the ruined city. Not that there's much to see. Just one worn-out high-rise after another. It's all cement – no greenery at all – but there are owl droppings on the higher floors, and evidence of rats. She could find meat in a pinch.

She finds the remains of a garbage nest - and some sucked-clean rat skeletons - in an alleyway, but no trace of the Decapodian boy who must have left them behind. Eventually she gives up trying to track down the others and simply heads back to the safety of a high building. The afternoon is spent trying to bait rats with the last of her jerky. A few are fool enough to come close, but they jump out of range before her knife can catch them. It's too big for such small prey. What she needs is a proper snare, but she has nothing to make one with.

Hunger creeps in. It starts to rain again.

She catches sight of the Amphisobian girl once, way off in the distance. She must have come out to enjoy the rain because she spins around in it, laughing. When the Careers approach she simply clambers up the side of a high-rise on suckered fingertips. They never even see her.

Leela drains the water in her canister. Filling it with rain and then purifying it kills some time, but soon enough it's back to boredom. She knows she should be out there killing things, making the audience like her, but it all seems like so much effort. She's tired, cold, and hungry, and the images from the Cornucopia still won't leave her alone. It's too early in the game to make any kills, she tells herself. She needs more time. The Careers will take care of most of the competition anyway. Wasn't that her original plan? To sit tight, wait it out, and then kill the last few standing? It should still work.

She stays hidden by her window for three days. Hunger claws at her stomach and the temperature drops again. The rain sleets down non-stop, in thick, drenching sheets.

On the second day the Decapodian boy dies. Celgnar corners him down in the street and crams his spear into the folds of shell coating the boy's stomach, cracking him open like a lobster. When the kid is down he plunges his hands into the wound and rips out one strange-looking organ after another, flinging them aside into the street, until finally the boy stops twitching and the cannon booms. Leela throws up pure bile, and doesn't stop shaking until she falls asleep.

On the third day she rigs herself a trap. It's pretty basic – a half-brick tied to her shoelace and suspended above her last decrepit piece of jerky – but after an hour of waiting she squashes a rat. There's not much meat on the critter – he's hardly worth the fire she risks to cook him – but it's something, and she feels better after eating.

The Careers whoop with joy when they see the Decapodian boy's face in the sky on day two. They are in a sour mood. Unable to track down anyone to kill, they have taken to fighting among themselves. They say they're just testing their reflexes, but anyone can see how high the tension is running. With any luck they'll snap soon and take each other out.

Of course life can't be that simple. Leela realizes this too late. The Careers have been extra bloodthirsty this year, but they haven't spaced out their kills well enough. They haven't provided a good show – and nor has Leela, tucked away in her hideyhole. Too late she remembers that starvation and her fellow tributes aren't the only dangers in the arena. She has to contend with the Gamemakers too.

They strike on the fourth morning. Leela wakes to a muted rumbling, like the sound of rush-hour traffic above the sewer. Only this rumbling is coming from below, shaking her heart in her ribcage, making her stomach flip.

She half sits up, clutching her backpack.

Something is wrong.

There is a screech from below – a great yawing scream of tormented metal and crumbling brickwork – and then the building collapses, taking Leela down with it.


	5. Chapter 5

Her vision is black. Brick dust clogs her nose and mouth and her entire body aches, but somehow, miraculously, _she's still alive_.

Leela can't see anything. For a moment she's scared the collapse has blinded her, but when she shifts a little a chink of light breaks through, and she realizes that she's just trapped under a lot of rubble.

_Move_, she tells herself. _You have to move_.

The cyclops feels dazed and winded, but she doesn't think she lost consciousness at any point, and she's not pinned under anything she can't lift. She can hardly believe her luck – until she raises her right hand and almost screams out loud.

No. _No_. It can't be broken.

Maybe it's just swollen. Maybe she banged it at a bad angle, or briefly cut off the blood supply, or maybe she is so acutely stressed she's hallucinating the whole thing. That can happen, she's heard of it. Psychosomatic pain. Maybe that's it.

Or maybe it's a sprain. Anything other than a break. If her arm is broken she's dead. She won't be able to fight or feed herself . . . oh, god. It's broken.

Leela struggles out of the wreckage, coughing. The dust is in her lungs, her hair, underneath her fingernails. As she stumbles across the street she can't shake the feeling that she is suffocating. She dives for the shelter of the building across the street. Gulps back the last of the water in her canteen, then sprays it over the floor when another coughing fit grips her. Pain shoots through her wrist.

_Broken_, she thinks numbly. _Broken, broken, broken_.

Somewhere the Gamemakers are sitting in luxury, laughing at her. They're probably congratulating themselves on a neat twist. Preparing to broadcast her picture in the sky and show her highlight reel to the audience. It makes her feel sick. Abner Doubledeal is going to murder her and pretend he was a good sport about it.

No. Not Doubledeal. Not really. He might be Head Gamemaker, but everyone knows who really runs the Games. Richard Nixon is the one with her blood on his hands. (Metaphorically speaking. Being a head in a jar and all, he doesn't actually have hands. Still. The point stands.)

Voices in the street outside bring her back to the present. Another wave of sickness floods her stomach. It's the Careers.

Of course – she should have known the sound of a building collapsing would get their attention. Leela shrinks back into the shadows and bites down on the collar of her jacket. She can't afford to cough or cry out in pain. Her hunting knife is buried in the rubble somewhere, and without the use of her right arm she doesn't think she could take on one of the Career pack – never mind three at once.

They pick through the debris, laughing.

"Whoohoo!" the Carcaron girl cries. "Go Gamemakers! Who do you think they got?"

"We don't know they got anyone. I didn't hear a cannon."

The Neptunian boy. Leela can just about see him, making lazy swipes at the rubble with his machete.

"That doesn't mean anything." This is the green blob. Brett. "There was a lot of noise. We could've missed it. Or there could be somebody under there." He grins. "Trapped."

"Dying slow."

"Yup."

"Guess we'll find out tonight either way."

"One down, though, right? Maybe the Gamemakers will flush out the rest of them the same way." This is the Carcaron girl again. "Now that I'd pay to see."

The conversation continues in this way for a while, as the Careers poke about in the wreckage. They don't bother to check any of the surrounding buildings. They obviously don't believe anyone could have survived the collapse. At last they head back to their camp at the Cornucopia, and Leela can breathe again. Most of the air is immediately wasted in another coughing fit, but eventually she clears the dust from her lungs and sits back to consider her situation.

Movement is impossible tonight. She is battered and bruised, and her stomach is more empty than she can take. The truth is that she is in no fit state to go anywhere. Like it or not, she has to rest.

The Careers will realize their mistake at midnight, when her face doesn't appear in the sky. Leela can only hope they will assume she fled the scene, and wait until morning to look for her. It isn't a hope she has a whole lot of faith in, but there's nothing else she can do. Unless a gift from a sponsor magically shows up to save her, she's doomed.

At least she can go out stoic, she supposes. The audience like that in a tribute. So she settles in for the night. The reflective foil has survived just fine in her backpack, and saves her the need to light a fire. She wraps it around herself, tucking in the edges for maximum insulation, then sets about crafting a makeshift splint for her arm. All she has to work with is a half a plank and the laces from her boots. She wants to scream as she ties it in place, but once she has it down it does help some. And it makes her look resourceful, so all in all it seems worth the pain.

The heavy rain starts up again. Leela sets her canister on the window to refill. The one benefit to her new position is that the damp brings out any number of bugs and beetles. Earthworms, slugs . . . at one point she even catches a snail. Desperate for any source of protein, she eats them all. Once she gets over the wriggling and the slime it's really not so bad, but she makes sure to play up her disgust for the cameras. With any luck this display of grossness will be so entertaining the Gamemakers will wait until morning to throw some new danger at her. It seems to work.

She doesn't sleep properly but she does start to doze. She doesn't even know she's doing it until she catches footsteps at the edge of her hearing. It's dark outside her window and there are figures in the street. Two of them.

The Careers. It must be past midnight. They have come for her after all.

Slowly, Leela drags her aching body upright. She picks up a plank from the floor. It isn't much of a weapon, and feels ungainly in the wrong hand, but there's no way in hell she's going to let them take her down without a fight.

"She's here," a voice says. "I can smell her."

"Alive?"

The second voice is frantic, and familiar. _Fry. _The shock is so huge she almost drops her plank.

Her lips form his name, but her throat is so dry the sound can't escape. The Careers haven't found her – Fry has. It doesn't make any sense.

"I can smell fresh blood," Jrr says. "She's definitely alive."

"Blood? She's _bleeding_? Oh my god, she's hurt. She could be dying. We have to find her!"

The panic in Fry's voice is too strong to be fake. It's the final straw for Leela. The plank clatters to the floor. She steps out of the shadows.

"Leela!"

Maybe she's just woozy from the hunger, but she didn't think a human being could move as fast as Fry does now. He is in front of her in a second, and then -

She freezes, thinking he has lunged for her throat. But he hasn't. Instead this skinny, mystifying boy has thrown his arms around her and pulled her into a crushing hug.

"You're alive," he chokes into her neck.

It feels weird. A little painful, because Leela is still an aching mess after the building collapse, but she minds it less than she should. The hug grounds her, makes her feel like a real person again instead of a cornered animal. It is warm and solid, which is another thing that shouldn't work, since the hugger himself is skin and bone.

"I'm alive," she confirms.

Fry nods fervently, but seems incapable of further speech. His face is hot against her neck.

Too hot.

Leela pulls back to take a better look at him. The color is high in his cheeks. His forehead is damp and he seems to be mostly breathing through his mouth. Shallow breaths at that. She frowns.

Fry is running a fever.

"You're sick," she tells him. She glances at Jrr. "He's sick. This isn't normal for a human."

The little Omicronian looks worried.

"It's not?"

"No."

"I'm fine," Fry interrupts. "You're hurt," he continues, his tone softening into concern again. "We heard the building go down," he mumbles. "I thought you were dead. But then they didn't show your face and I knew – I knew . . ."

It is Leela's turn to interrupt.

"I don't understand," she says. "Why are you here? What do you want from me?"

Fry blinks.

"You know. " He gestures vaguely at the space between them. "To be friends. You and me. Us."

"You mean . . . an alliance?"

Leela looks to Jrr for confirmation. He nods.

"I can't fight," she admits. She indicates her injured hand.

"I don't care."

"Then you're crazy."

"Then I'm crazy. So what?"

"Just come with us for tonight," Jrr puts in. "If you want to leave tomorrow you can. We won't hurt you. But he likes you and I don't know what to do with a sick human, so maybe we need you more than you think. Please?"

Leela looks at their beseeching expressions. She looks down the cold wet street.

What does she have to lose?

* * *

Fry and Jrr have made camp in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city. It takes them an hour to make the journey back. Fry and Leela take turns leaning on Jrr, until he feels sorry for them and simply throws them both over his broad shoulders.

Inside the warehouse a paraffin lamp is flickering. The boys have arranged some old crates around it to sit on. They give Leela smoky-tasting meat they say is owl, and fresh water to drink. Fry watches her eat in the lamplight, his eyes darting to and away the way they used to in the training center.

"Where did you get this?" Leela asks, holding up a wing.

Fry shrugs.

"I shot it. I have this gun, it shoots lasers. Jrr got it for me at the Cornucopia. It's good because it fries them."

"You humans have to cook your meat," Jrr explains. "It's hard when you can't light any fires. The Careers and all."

Leela nods.

"That makes sense. Still . . . you shot an owl, Fry? You must be a pretty good shot."

"I guess." Fry looks uncomfortable. "I used to play a lot of video games back in my time, before I got frozen. I can aim at stuff."

"That's why the Gamemakers scored you so high in your evaluation," Leela realizes.

"Yeah. They thought it would be useful. But I can't shoot people. I don't even like shooting owls," Fry confesses. "I figured that out in training. About the people, I mean. Not the owls. I never really thought about the owls, until I was in here."

"I got that."

Leela stares at him, incredulous. He is starving because he's too squeamish to kill his own meat. Definitely the product of a surface upbringing.

She feels a lot better with food in her stomach, so she sits back and takes a proper look at her new allies for the first time. Jrr is mostly unchanged. He seems more self-assured, and his scaly hide looks thicker than before, but other than that there is no change in him. Fry, on the other hand . . . Aside from the fever and the fact that he is far too thin, his face is streaked with dirt. His clothes are torn and ragged-looking, like Jrr's cloak, but on Fry's she can see definite bloodstains.

"What happened?" she asks.

"We were sticking to the edge of the city," Jrr says. "We didn't see another tribute for days. I think the Gamemakers got bored of us. They sent this pack of . . . _things_ . . . after us. Like your Earth wolves but bigger. Fiercer."

"Mutts," Leela guesses.

The Gamemakers do that sometimes. They cross-breed surface animals in a lab, douse them in chemicals and drive them crazy . . . then unleash the resulting horror-creatures on the tributes. In slang terms, they're known as "mutts". In the Games, they're almost certain death.

Jrr nods.

"I took care of them" - the light shines on his fleem, on his sharp yellow teeth - "but I wasn't fast enough."

Fry grimaces.

"It wasn't your fault they bit me."

"They _bit_ you?" Leela is horrified. "Show me."

Fry rolls up his left pant leg.

"Oh my god."

The wound is nasty. Teethmarks have mangled the flesh of his calf, and his improvised bandage is already bloody.

Even though she knows this must be the source of the fever already gaining hold of him, Leela insists on washing and redressing the wound. She puts some of her own iodine drops on it for good measure. As if any of it will do any good now. Fry needs medicine. Without it . . .

She pushes the thought away. There is only so much she can cope with in twenty-four hours.

A second issue rears its head when she realizes that Fry has no heat-reflecting blanket like hers, and he and Jrr can't set fires. He has been sleeping in the cold. With a _fever_. Jrr is no help either – he doesn't understand the problem, and his scaly hide doesn't give off any heat.

In the end she and Fry share the foil blanket. Jrr opts to take the first watch.

Fry falls asleep almost instantly. He curls into her, hot forehead pressed to her clavicle. Leela can feel his ragged breath over her heart. Half of her wants to wake him and push him back into his own space. The other half feels strangely protective.

"He likes you, you know," Jrr says quietly.

"Jrr -"

"_Likes_ likes you. He told me."

"I . . . right."

Leela doesn't know what to say to this.

"He was a mess the first night we were in here," Jrr goes on. "I wouldn't let him go back to the Cornucopia and he knew you were there. Every time the cannon went off he practically jumped out of his skin. When your picture didn't come up that night I thought he was gonna start crying, he was so happy." He grins a little. "Every day it was _'I wonder where Leela is'_ and '_I hope Leela's okay_'. And stuff about how pretty your eye is. There was a lot of that."

Leela snorts.

"My eye? His sponsors must be sending him hard drugs if he thinks that's pretty."

"They're not. He hasn't had anything from sponsors," Jrr tells her. "I got a whetstone to sharpen my fleem with though. I think Kif was trying to tell me I should get out there and use it."

"Why haven't you?"

It's a fair question, in Leela's mind. Jrr is a lot stronger than he looks. The more time she spends with him, the more certain she becomes – Jrr's weakness is all in his mind. He doesn't want to kill, and for an Omicronian - and a tribute in the Games - that doesn't make any sense.

He seems to know what she's thinking.

"Because that's not who I want to be," he argues. "In my species, killing is the only way to progress. You're not even considered an adult until you kill your first human. And after that day it's like it never stops. We take over whole planets! We kill our own families in these crazy honor feuds, we hunt everything . . . It's killing, killing, killing, all day long. But that's not me. I like cartoons and building model spaceships, and I like humans. I really do! I know they're stupid and puny, but they're funny. They have some good ideas." His eyes shift to Fry. "And a human was kinder to me than everyone on my home planet, so. But, well . . ."

He chews on his fingernails. Talons. Whatever.

Leela can sense something bad is coming.

"Well, what?"

Jrr sighs.

"I'm Omicronian," he says miserably. "If I lose control, if I let the blood lust take over, I'm scared I'll forget who Fry is. He'll just be . . . food. It's not my fault!" he protests. "It's in my biology. But it's happening already. Since the bloodbath, and the mutt things . . ." He shudders. "It's getting worse and worse. I think I love Fry more than I've ever loved anybody in my whole life. More than my parents, even. But his blood smells so good I wake up drooling sometimes, and I just know I was dreaming about eating him. Hunting him down, and biting and tearing . . . It's horrible. I feel like I'm not even in control of my own body."

Leela feels her good hand tighten on Fry's shoulder. He twitches, mumbles something incoherent in his sleep. After a moment he settles down again.

"Why are you telling me this?" she whispers.

Jrr meets her gaze.

"Because I think you care about him too," he says simply. "And I think you'd do what you have to do to keep him safe." He fingers the sharp edge of the fleem. "Even if he wouldn't want you to."

There is a long silence.

Jrr is asking her to kill him if ever tries to eat Fry. It's crazy, but in a strange way Leela respects it.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yes. Okay." She glances down at Fry. "I'll help you keep him safe. Against anyone."


	6. Chapter 6

Leela wakes feeling warm and sluggish.

Light is breaking over the horizon. Jrr sits hunched by the window, staring out at the street. He is turning something over in his huge hands. Something silvery. Too small to be his fleem.

"We got a parachute?"

Leela can't believe it. A parachute means a gift from a sponsor. Food, medicine . . . it means hope.

Jrr smiles tiredly.

"He did, I think." He indicates Fry. "But you guys were asleep and I didn't want to wake you. I thought sleep might help."

Leela can't deny she feels better for the rest. Her arm is still throbbing, but for the first time in days she didn't have to dredge up the energy to open her eye. She pulls herself upright. Fry is still asleep beside her. His condition has deteriorated during the night. His hair is slick with sweat and his forehead burns like a furnace under her hand.

He wakes up gasping when he feels her pull away.

"Leela?"

"Hey. Don't get up." She smiles. "Look what we got."

"A parachute?" Fry mumbles. "That doesn't make any sense. Why would they send us a parachute? They hate us."

"Apparently not." Leela takes the silver sphere from Jrr and cracks it open. "Let's see what we got."

What they get is a real splint for Leela, and clean bandages. There is a tub of ointment in there too. It is thick and goopy, with a sharp antiseptic smell. Leela tests a bead of it on her own skin, watching as it stops up the blood flow from a tiny scratch. It's some kind of coagulant, she realizes. It might finally stop Fry's wound bleeding, and kill off the infection to boot.

It's more than she could have hoped for.

"Thank you, Amy," she breathes. She has no idea what she and Fry could possibly have done to get sponsors, but the only one who could send them this stuff is Amy, and she could only send it with significant sponsor interest.

The morning passes quietly. Jrr flops into a corner to sleep, so Leela takes his position by the window. She washes Fry's wound again, applies the cream, and bandages it heavily. Afterward she makes him drink as much water as he can stomach, and tries to get him to lie down again. Fry insists on fixing the new splint for her first. His hands are unsteady but gentle. It doesn't hurt as much as Leela was expecting.

When he is done he sits down opposite her. The cold air plays across his face, takes down some of the flush in his cheeks.

"Have you -" He coughs. "You were at the Cornucopia. You stayed to fight. Did you - did you have to . . .?"

_Did you have to kill anyone?_ Leela knows what he's asking. Her throat goes dry. In her mind's eye she can see the blood on Celgnar's spear. The Decapodian boy twitching in the rain-washed street. Mrrxxss's feeler severed by her hunting knife.

"No," she says at last. "Did you?"

Fry shakes his head.

"Just the mutt things."

They lapse into silence.

"Leela?"

"Yeah?"

"Will you tell me about your life in the sewer?"

"Why would you want to know about that?"

"I just do." Fry's blue eyes bore into her. "It's your life."

Leela hesitates.

"Please?" he says softly.

She sighs.

"Alright."

Leela doesn't understand why her life in the sewer holds such fascination for him. If he is hoping she might expose some horrors on live television, like he did, he's in for a disappointment. With her mother still stuck down there, Leela doesn't dare say anything that could be used against her. She keeps it light instead, talking about her family and the things she learned in school. Mushroom pancakes on her birthday. Fishing on the lake. The tin-can xylophone. She mentions, as casually as she can manage, that her mother was ill once and they thought she wouldn't make it. It's hard to put into words how relieved she was when Munda woke up. Especially when she's not sure Fry understands what she is trying to say.

"I was so grateful," she murmurs.

Fry smiles, and she thinks maybe he understands after all.

"Do you miss them?" she asks out of the blue. "Your family, I mean."

Fry stares at his knees.

"Sometimes," he admits. "Sometimes . . . there's this moment some days, right before I wake up, where I don't remember. That's the worst."

"Me too," Leela whispers. "Sometimes I can't remember his face. My dad. I can't remember the way his voice used to sound."

Fry nods.

"I wanted it to stop hurting so much," he says. "But the more it stops hurting, the more I forget them. I don't want to forget them."

Leela swallows. There is a lump in her throat.

"I know."

"If I die here, no-one on this whole planet will remember them. I hate that."

"I know."

Leela feels useless. Grief was never something she knew how to handle. She touches his hand – feather-light, uncertain. If she is intruding he can pull away and they can pretend it never happened. But his fingers twine around hers instead.

Leela squeezes on instinct. Fry squeezes back.

* * *

Another parachute glides down out of the sky that evening. Bread and broth.

"I don't understand why they keep sending us stuff," Fry says. "We're not doing anything."

Jrr stuffs a whole, frantically squeaking rat into his mouth.

"It's you two," he says when he stops chewing. "They must like all the love stuff."

"What love stuff?"

Leela is mystified. She owes Fry. Likes him, even, and she is determined to help him survive, but there's nothing romantic about it. There haven't been any kisses or sappy declarations of love.

"All we do is talk," she says.

"And sleep together," Jrr points out. "You're doing it again tonight."

"We're conserving body heat!"

Jrr snorts.

"Yeah, by _cuddling_."

"I'm trying to keep him _alive!_" Leela spits, before she can cool down and rein in her mouth.

Fry blinks.

"You're trying to keep me alive?" he says. He looks confused, but hopeful.

Leela reddens.

"What do you think I've been doing all day?" she asks.

"I don't know. Helping me, I guess. Being nice." Fry has turned his own unique shade of red. "I was wondering why."

Leela stares at him. His fever is down. He is still clutching a hunk of the bread their supposed romance bought him. It hits her then that if Jrr is right and the "love stuff" is winning them sponsors, the wrong response could cost them everything.

"It's . . . I . . ." She can't think what to say. This is a disaster. "We're allies now," she manages. "Aren't we?"

Jrr shrugs. Fry only waits.

Not good enough. She needs to provide something more.

"You came looking for me," she says quietly. "When you thought I was hurt. You cared."

The last word is almost a whisper. It's painful to admit that she cares what he thinks of her, that she is weak enough to be affected by one stranger in here who cares whether she lives or dies. But she is.

"Of course I cared."

Fry's voice has softened to match hers. His eyes are wide in the flickering lamplight. The bread sits forgotten in his hand.

Jrr looks awkward.

"I think I'll take first watch again," he says, snapping the spell. "You guys should sleep."

Sleeping with Fry that night is awkward. Now that his fever has broken he doesn't curl so close, just lies next to her staring up at the rats in the rafters. Still, Leela feels _aware_ of him in a way she wasn't last night. The heat radiating off his skinny body, the way his warm breath tickles her skin . . . the things that comforted her the night before now make her nervous.

Without so much worry to distract her, she is acutely aware of the fact that she is lying down with a boy for the first time in her life.

A boy who likes her. _Likes_ likes her.

Oh, and both their lives may depend on Leela convincing a pampered surface audience they are falling in love.

The only experience she has in this area is the time Moose asked her out and she laughed in his face. She doesn't know how these things are supposed to go.

"What's wrong?" Fry asks. He swings onto his side, staring at her through the dark. "You look like you're thinking. Or something. You can ignore me if I'm wrong."

"Jrr said you like me," Leela blurts out. Her face is surely on fire. "He said you think my eye is pretty."

She laughs nervously. Saying it out loud, to a human, makes it sound even more absurd. As if he could really -

"I do."

"What?"

"I said, I do."

Is that a yes to both charges, Leela wonders, or just the eye thing? And why doesn't he seem ashamed of it?

"You think my eye is pretty?" she ventures.

"Yes."

Fry's voice catches in his throat. He is staring at her with an intensity Leela has never seen from him before.

"Why? It's hideous."

"No, it's not." His hand ghosts across her cheek. "It's beautiful."

He drops his hand, and Leela feels a pang of disappointment. She wanted him to keep touching her. She doesn't know why.

"I'm a mutant," she reminds him. "We're inferior genetic scum, remember? We're not beautiful, Fry."

"You are."

"You're crazy."

"Maybe. But I don't think it's the kind of crazy you can cure." Fry grimaces, shifting the weight off his injured leg. "And I still like your eye."

He sighs, settling down to sleep.

Leela watches him. His eyes are drifting shut, and his breathing has begun to even out.

She doesn't know what makes her say it.

"I like . . ."

She thinks about Fry's intent gaze, his kind words, the warmth of him curled against her heart.

"I like you."

* * *

Leela is woken by the sound of rain hammering against the window pane. Fry's heartbeat is warm and steady underneath her cheek. They have tangled together in their sleep, limbs interlocking in a complex pattern she can't believe is accidental. When she shifts position the unexpected friction makes her breath catch. Fry shifts too, trying to pull her back. The movement only makes it worse – drags a low sound from the back of her throat and makes Leela want to move again, to . . . to what, exactly, she doesn't know. She can feel her pulse throbbing in places it has no right to. It doesn't help that Fry has such a tight hold on her, and now that he isn't battling fever, his body has decided it can spare the energy to fuel more awkward parts of his anatomy. This is both flattering and horrifying.

_We're on TV_, Leela thinks. _Oh my god. My mother is watching this_.

She extricates herself quickly and shakes Fry by the shoulder.

"Fry, get up. It's morning."

Fry wakes slowly, with a lot of grumbling. Maybe he's tired, or maybe he just doesn't want to leave whatever dream he was in.

"Huh . . . wha . . . oh, no."

He looks down, mortified.

"You know what I could use?" Leela says brightly. "A shower. Or at least a wash. There's plenty of rain and I'm sure there's something around here we could use as a tub. Who cares if all we have is cold water?"

"Not me," Fry says quickly. He pulls the foil blanket up. "Cold water sounds good to me. Ice, ice cold water."

Leela flushes.

"I'll get right on that."

"Sure. Uh . . . ladies first!"

"I'll call you when I'm done."

"Great!" Fry looks relieved. "I'll just . . . sit here for a while. Until I'm, um . . . really awake."

"Good idea."

There is a snickering sound from behind her. Leela turns to see Jrr covering his mouth with his hand, shaking as silent laughter racks his form.

"I have some questions about human mating rituals," he chokes out. He doubles over, laughing too hard to say anything more. Leela has never seen him so amused.

She tries to pull herself together.

"Well, then you should ask Fry," she says. "He's the human."

Fry turns pink, sputtering incoherently.

"Leela!"

"Time to shower!"

"Stop laughing! _Jrr!_ I'm serious! Leela, help!"

* * *

The cold water leaves her gasping, but it helps. By the time Leela returns her body is too numb to feel anything at all. Fry seems to feel the same. They are united in their annoyance at Jrr, who won't stop laughing, even when they throw the broth pot and their shoes at him. Eventually he laughs himself out of breath and just lies on the floor, holding his stomach.

"You two are funny," he gasps.

"Shut up," they tell him together.

It's a weird day. The rain persists, heavier than Leela has ever seen it, so they stay inside. Fry shows her his laser gun. He shoots rats off the rafters, and they pick the bones clean for lunch.

They practice throwing stones at the overturned broth pot, and Leela tries hand-to-hand combat with Jrr. Her attempts at both are pathetic. Without her dominant hand, she is next to useless.

Water rises ankle-high in the street, and still the rain shows no sign of slacking off. They wonder aloud if the Gamemakers are trying to flush them out with a flood. It's too early to be sure, but they all agree that if the situation gets much worse they will give up their sanctuary and head for higher ground. Leela hates the thought of going anywhere near the high-rises after the collapse, but she hates the thought of drowning or catching pneumonia more. So she agrees that if worst comes to worst they should take shelter up high.

It isn't until Fry goes to take a sip of water from their canteen, and spits it all over the floor, that they realize the other problem with the rain.

It's salted.

"Why would they put salt in the rain?" Fry sputters, clawing at his tongue.

Leela and Jrr exchange looks.

"They're contaminating the water supply," Leela says. "They want to draw us out."

"Maybe not us," Jrr points out. "Celgnar is out there too. And the green girl."

"Still. The Careers have all the supplies piled up at the Cornucopia. Food. Water. Weapons. We're not stupid enough to go for them when we're outnumbered like this, and neither is Celgnar. The Gamemakers must be getting impatient."

She doesn't say it, but they're all thinking the same thing. It's been too long since someone died.

"We're not that outnumbered," Fry says suddenly. "It's only three against four. We could -"

"No." Leela cuts him off. "We can't take the Careers. One of us can't fight" - she indicates herself - "and two of us don't want to. It'd be suicide."

Silence falls.

"I'm gonna take a walk," Jrr says. "Maybe there's a source of fresh water we haven't thought of. It can't hurt to look, right?"

"Maybe someone will send us some," Fry says.

Oh. _Sponsors_. It hits her like a thunderbolt. Sponsors would send them water, but only if they get something in return. Jrr is smarter than Fry – he's probably figured that out already. His decision to look for water is most likely just an excuse to leave the two of them alone.

Leela swallows. Whatever humor they found in this situation earlier has just evaporated. She will have to kiss Fry now, escalate things with him somehow.

How? How do people do this?

Fry is staring out the window, watching Jrr slosh down the street.

"It's happening, isn't it?" he says quietly. "It's ending."

"Are you scared?"

Leela doesn't know what makes her ask. He just looks so distant.

Fry frowns.

"I don't know. I was. I wanted it to all be over. But now you're here and . . . and I don't want it to end. Not yet."

"I know what you mean," Leela says. "The more I think about dying, the more I think about . . . about all the things I'll never get the chance to do. Things I never thought were important before."

She is reaching here, but she can't think of a more natural way to plant the idea in his head.

"Like what?" Fry asks.

"Don't laugh."

"I won't."

"Okay. Well . . . I've never . . . I've never kissed anyone."

Her face flames at the admission. _No acting required_, she thinks bitterly. It hurts that the surface can rob this milestone from her, take it on their terms the way they want to take her life.

Fry laughs.

"Fry!"

He stops.

"Oh, right, sorry. I said I wouldn't laugh. I just . . . I mean, it's only kissing, Leela. It's not _that_ great."

Leela flinches. This isn't how she expected this to go.

"How would you know?" she demands.

She can't keep the edge out of her voice. For some reason it never occurred to her that Fry might have any more experience in the world of kissing than she did. Maybe because he's so skinny and red-headed and, well, awkward.

He shrugs, oblivious.

"I've kissed lots of people," he tells her, offhandedly. "The girls in the orphanarium used to practice on me."

"What girls?"

"Eh. Colleen, Michelle . . . Colleen just made out with everybody, and Michelle used to say I was cute but she'd deny it if anyone asked her. She only wanted to be a good kisser for when Adlai Atkins asked her out one day." He rolls his eyes. "Oh, and there was that time the lights cut out and Randy kissed me, but he _says_ he thought I was Colleen. And I guess there was the Xmas party last year, when Warden Proctor got drunk and kinda just attacked me with her mouth. That was weird."

Leela is staring. She thinks suddenly of her parents – of how happy they used to look when they kissed.

"That sounds awful," she says before she can stop herself. "Didn't anybody ever kiss you for you?"

"What do you mean, for me?" Fry seems bewildered by the question. "You mean like a present? Um . . . Warden Proctor said I was a dirty boy and I was getting what I deserved. Before she tried to bite my tongue off. Does that count?"

Leela shudders. It seems Warden Proctor's cruel, repressed veneer concealed an unguessed-at level of crazy.

"No, it absolutely doesn't. I mean, didn't anyone ever kiss you because they liked you? Because . . . because you were kind, or funny. Or because you made them feel . . ."

Why is she so tongue-tied?

Fry seems to get it anyway. He looks troubled.

"No," he mumbles. "No-one ever did that."

"Oh."

Leela swallows. She feels like her heart is fluttering in her stomach.

She leans in.

"Fry?"

"Yeah?"

He looks miserable, a world away.

"I'm going to."

His eyes widen, startled, and then Leela presses her lips to his. It's a light touch, and her cheeks are already burning with embarrassment when she pulls back.

Fry stares at her. His mouth is a little bit open.

And then he kisses her back.

His mouth is warm and wet. He has one arm around her waist, pulling her in. His other hand is in her hair. His thumb brushes her cheek, her neck, the shell of her ear.

Leela can't think. She feels like a part of her is melting. She doesn't know what the hell she's doing, but it doesn't seem to matter. She never wants this to end. Every time one of them needs air they break contact for a second, gasp in a breath, and find the other's mouth again. She doesn't know if it's all one long kiss, or a series of smaller ones. She doesn't care.

When they break apart she feels like the world is shifting beneath her feet. Fry looks dazed.

"I think I was wrong," he says hoarsely. "Kissing _is_ a big deal."

And then Jrr screams out in the street.


	7. Chapter 7

The rain is coming down heavier than ever. Driving. Blinding. Leela shakes her bangs out of her eye, grimacing as salt water slops into her open mouth.

Fry is yelling, frantic.

"Jrr! _Jrr!_"

The water has risen to waist-level. The flood is coming faster now. _Gamemakers, _Leela thinks bitterly.

"Jrr!" she shouts.

Fry stumbles, almost goes under. Leela has to hoick him up by his collar. He grips her arm tightly, white-faced and disoriented as the current sucks at his skinny body.

"Leela," he chokes. "Leela, I can't swim."

_Damn, _Leela thinks. Of course he can't swim. He didn't grow up in the sewer, and it's not like that orphanarium had a pool.

"Keep a hold of me," she tells him. "I'll keep you afloat."

She grips his shoulder tightly, her injured arm thrown out for balance. It hurts, but it's better than going under. Fry fumbles for handholds – walls, garbage cans, brickwork – and the two of them push on down the street. There is no possible way to conceal their approach. Every step results in ripples ten feet ahead of them. Fry has the laser gun tucked inside his jacket, but other than that they are completely unarmed.

Jrr is two blocks away, trapped under a weighted net. He is gurgling, screaming as the water floods his mouth and nose. Every time he tries to stand the weights around his neck drag him down again. The harder he tries to free himself, the more entangled he becomes.

Leela tears the net away and Fry grabs Jrr's arm, hauling the stocky Omicronian to his feet.

"What happened?"

Jrr gapes at them.

"The Careers!" he gulps out. "They got me, they're coming! You have to get out of here! Leela, you promised!"

Leela barely has time to open her mouth, to tell him that Fry is safe, it was just a trap . . . when she realizes it _was_ just a trap. The aim was to drown Jrr and draw out his allies, and like a fool, she walked right into it.

Just as she has this thought, the Carcaron girl shoots up from under the water.

Of course. Her species is closest to Earth's sharks. All her senses have evolved to function best under water. The salt flood must be a dream come true for her – her natural habitat replicated for her in the arena.

Her head snaps back and forth. Water sluices out of her gills. And then she lunges at Jrr.

He must be dizzy from his near-drowning, because his reactions are slow. He loses his balance, goes down again, and with the weight of the Carcaron girl on top of him, he's not getting up easy. They wrestle, partway under the water.

Something sharp whizzes past Leela's ear. Blood streaks across her cheek as she turns her head to catch sight of it, but it's too fast. It's already gone.

Another whizzing sound, and this time she sees it – an evil bronze throwing star, stuck in the wall behind her. She follows its trajectory and realizes it came from the hulking green shape on the balcony opposite. Brett the blob. The stocky Neptunian boy appears at his shoulder, a machete glinting cruelly in his hand.

_Careers never hunt alone_, she snaps at herself. She was an idiot to forget it.

"Fry, get down!" she shrieks. He is still standing beside her, frozen in fear.

Wait, no. He's not. He's frozen in shock. As Leela watches he puts a hand up to his shoulder. Bright red blood comes away on his fingers.

That first throwing star found a mark after all. It's half-buried under Fry's collarbone.

His forehead creases in confusion.

"It's stuck," he says dumbly. Before Leela can stop him, he reaches up and yanks it free.

Blood pours out. It sprays Leela's face, turns the water around them swirling crimson. Up on the balcony the Careers are laughing. They must have learned from their earlier mistakes at the bloodbath. They intend to drag these deaths out, give the Gamemakers a show and increase their own chances of going home.

Fry starts to shake. The blood is still surging out of him. All Leela can do is say his name, over and over.

"Fry! No . . . _Fry!_"

She feels broken.

The color is starting to drain from Fry's face. He fumbles in his jacket, searching for the gun, and . . .

The gun.

Leela stares at it. At Fry's shaking hands as he tries to pass it her.

With her good hand, she sets the charge. Her fingers curl around the trigger. Brett scarcely has time to register the weapon before Leela fires a violet ray at him. It's a loose, poorly-aimed shot, but it hits his slimy underside, searing a smoking line into the vivid green flesh. Brett hops instinctively away from the pain and loses his footing. He topples from the shelter of the balcony into the churning brine below.

His scream is agonizing. Too extreme for simple salt water, Leela thinks. But salt water seems to work like acid on his alien body. He screams and writhes, shriveling up before their eyes as great streaks of green are sucked out of him. _Osmosis, _she thinks dully. She remembers the word from chemistry class.

_Boom_. The cannon sounds.

The Neptunian boy disappears from view. Whether he intends to flee the scene or join the fray Leela doesn't know. It doesn't seem to matter anyway, because Fry's blood is still spilling into the water, and she can barely hold him up.

From somewhere behind her comes a terrifying, inhuman roar.

She turns slowly.

Jrr is rising from the crimson water. He has the Carcaron girl in his hands. His eyes are wide, mad, the pupils contracted to tiny pinpricks.

He roars again, shaking the girl like a rag doll . . . and then he rips her throat out. Her blood gushes into his open mouth and he swallows it eagerly. His limbs are shaking now, nostrils flaring wide. He bellows out an inarticulate war cry, and tears apart the corpse in his hands.

_Boom. _

Jrr sniffs. The smell of blood settles deep in his lungs. He reaches over his shoulder, grasps his fleem and spins around. The Neptunian boy is creeping up on him, machete raised to strike, but he doesn't stand a chance. The metal teeth of the fleem grip his neck, Jrr pulls the handle upwards, and the boy's head flies off.

_Boom._

Leela wants to be sick. Fry is shuddering violently.

"Jrr," he whispers.

Jrr's attention snaps to him. The Omnicronian stalks over to them. His eyes are still bright. Crazy. When he looks at them, there is no hint of recognition on his face. Something does flash there - confusion, maybe? Leela isn't sure and she can't waste time wondering, because he has dropped the fleem and is reaching for Fry. He touches the boy's face. Runs his hands through his hair. Tastes the blood . . .

He opens his mouth wide.

"Jrr, no!" Fry yells.

Leela doesn't have time to think. She picks up the fleem, throws all her weight behind it . . . and drives it through the roof of Jrr's mouth.

Gray matter spatters the wall. Blood runs down her arms.

Fry screams, Jrr grunts, and together the three of them fall.

The cannon sounds.

* * *

The water rushes in her eardrums, and every panicked beat of her heart sounds like the cannon going off again.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

_You did that, _a voice whispers in her head. _You killed Jrr. _

Leela surfaces, gasping. She can't think about that yet.

Fry is still screaming when she pulls him up. He thrashes wildly, fighting her with all his feeble strength.

"Fry, it's me! It's Leela! I'm not going to hurt you!"

It's no use. Fry's eyes are wide and unfocused. Every muscle in his skinny body is tensed tight, and he won't stop screaming. He's hysterical, Leela realizes. Gone off the deep end. Suddenly she remembers herself at ten, screaming when she heard of the pipeway collapse. She wonders if she looked anything like this then. Gone, empty, absent from her own head.

It's an unsettling thought.

Fry can't hurt her – he doesn't have the strength – but it's hard to keep a hold of him when he won't stay still, and Leela is worried about the trouble his screams might bring down on them. Celgnar and Mrrxxss are still out there, and the Amphisobian girl. Right now they'd be easy pickings for any of them.

Blood is still pouring from Fry's shoulder. They are standing in a red river that stretches half the length of the street. How much of the blood belongs to Fry is hard to say, but the flow from his shoulder is steady and persistent, and his face is deathly white. He has clearly lost more than he can afford.

Leela slings her injured arm around Fry's neck and slaps him hard with her good hand. It's brutal, but it works to snap him out of it. He stops screaming and gulps for air like a stunned fish.

"We have to move," Leela tells him. "We're not safe here."

Recognition dawns on Fry slowly.

"Leela?"

"Yeah, Leela. C'mon."

"Are you going to hurt me?"

"Why would I hurt you?"

"Why wouldn't you?"

Leela frowns. In a way, he's right. Fry is pretty much done for. She could leave him right now and he would bleed to death in an hour. Maybe less if he passes out and slips beneath the water. The Career pack is mostly out of the running. There's a chance Leela could take the remaining three tributes with a little help from her sponsors. Now that she's a killer, she could ditch the love angle and step into the vacated shoes of the Careers.

But to do it she would have to leave Fry, and for some reason she can't do that. She can't spend tonight alone in the cold, waiting for the boom of the cannon. Knowing that the next time she sees his face it will be projected onto the sky in eulogy. If she walks away now she will spend the rest of her life stuck in this moment, hating herself.

"I told you," she says numbly. "I'm trying to keep you alive."

"Why?"

The answer is complicated. _Because you saved my mother,_ Leela thinks. _Because you treated me like a person. Because I kissed you and it meant something I can't explain. _

_Because you're waking me up, and it scares the hell out of me. _

But she can't say any of this in front of the cameras. His interview got Fry in enough trouble. Talking about how he broke the rules and offered friendship to a trespassing mutant would only make it worse. Mentioning the jealousy she felt when he told the truth about Nixon's regime would kill their sponsor support stone dead, and telling the world he makes her think seditious thoughts would probably get them both murdered.

So she does the only thing she knows the Gamemakers won't interpret as treason. She leans in and kisses him hard on the mouth.

He tastes like salt. At first Leela thinks it's the water, but when she pulls away she can see the tear tracks on his face. She doesn't know why he's crying. Maybe it's pain. Maybe it's grief. Maybe he no longer trusts her reasons for kissing him. She doesn't dare ask.

"We need to move," she says instead.

Fry nods.

"Okay," he whispers.

Leela peels off her sweater, wads it up, and presses it against the wound on his shoulder. The pressure stems some of the bleeding. Fry keeps the makeshift compress in place with his opposite hand, and Leela wraps her good arm around his waist to hold him up. They make slow progress like this, but for once the Gamemakers seem to be on their side. The flood waters are already starting to recede. By the time they reach the ruined city center, the streets are wet but passable, and the rain has stopped.

Fry is in a bad way. Between blood loss and sheer exhaustion he can barely stay upright. His grip on the compress keeps going slack, and he sways even without the current sucking at his legs.

Leela drags them into one of the high rises. The ground floor is slimy and reeking after the flood, and she doesn't trust the Gamemakers not to send another one, so they make camp on the third floor. Their clothes are sticking to them and the cold is making Leela's teeth chatter, so she gathers up all the furniture she can find and sets a fire in the center of the room. Fry protests but she waves him down.

"We can't afford to get sick," she tells him.

"B-but . . . the others," Fry says weakly. "They'll see."

"Maybe," Leela concedes. "I don't think they'll come though. Mrrxxss is the only Career left, remember? She can't guard everything at the Cornucopia by herself. I bet one of the others will try to take her tonight, before she figures out the rest of the Pack is dead. Celgnar, probably. Martians aren't built for the cold, and I don't think he was getting any sponsors. He'll be tempted for sure."

"What about the g-g-girl?"

Fry is shivering. He drags himself closer to the fire, steam curling from his clothes.

Leela shrugs.

"She'll be careful, I think. She seems crafty. If she wasn't anywhere near when . . . when everything happened today, then she probably just heard a bunch of cannons go off. She won't know who's dead yet, or what happened. She might even think the Gamemakers set something off. That would be good. She won't want to come too close."

"Is – is that it?" Fry asks. "J-just the f-five of us?"

"Yeah."

Leela loads some more rotting planks onto the fire. They sputter fitfully.

"M-maybe we should split up," Fry stutters.

Leela stares at him.

"What? Why the hell would we do that?" The suggestion makes her angry somehow. "I already told you, I'm not going to hurt you. Jrr was – Jrr -" Her voice keeps catching on his name. Sweet, softhearted Jrr. His blood is still crusted over her jacket. _You promised, _she reminds herself. "He attacked you," she tells Fry. "I did what I had to do."

Fry shakes his head.

"Tha's not what I meant," he mumbles. His words are starting to slur. "'s the Games, remember? 'S all ending. An' then . . . you know. What happens."

He seems to be having difficulty staying awake.

Leela frowns.

"Fry?" She shakes him by the shoulder. "Fry, wake up. You can't go to sleep."

"Mmnhmm . . ."

"Fry!"

She hates herself for slapping him again – he's beat up enough by now – but she can't think what else to do. The thought of him falling asleep in this condition fills her with terror.

Uncertain what else to do, she drags him as close to the fire as she can get without turning him into human kindling. The heat sears her face, but it barely seems to touch Fry. He remains as pale as before. His eyes keep drifting shut.

In desperation, Leela unzips his jacket and crawls inside, pressing her body against every inch of him she can reach. She knows it's bad when he doesn't even react.

"Stay awake," she growls. "We'll get something soon. From sponsors. You have to hold on until then."

"But . . . ending . . . the Games . . . we . . ."

"We're not splitting up," Leela snaps. "End of discussion."

There is a long silence. She huffs on Fry's cold hands. Tries to rub some life into them.

"Talk to me," she orders. "Tell me something."

"Like . . . like . . . what?"

"Anything."

"Well . . . I always wanted to go to space."

It's an unexpected confession.

Leela snorts.

"I thought the whole reason you were doing this was so you wouldn't have to go to space."

She doesn't mention Halley's Comet by name. She feels like using the words would be bad luck somehow, even though they're already out there and sponsors surely can't forget them.

Fry catches her meaning anyway.

"Not like that," he argues. "That's not real space. That's just . . . a prison. I mean . . . I mean exploring. New worlds and aliens and rocket ships, forever and ever and ever. That's what I used to dream about, when I was a kid."

"In your time?"

"Always, I guess."

He's warming up, Leela notes with relief. He no longer sounds like a drunk slurring his words, and he winces when she puts pressure on his wound. It's a good sign.

"Where would you go?"

Fry considers the question. The look in his eyes is one Leela has never seen before. Far-off. Dreamy.

"The Moon," he says. "To see the site of the moon landing, and . . . oh, Neil Armstrong's bootprint. And the Keeler crater on Mars. And the Venusian Gardens, and the Ice Fields of Hyperion. And Pluto, even though everyone says it's not a planet anymore . . ."

"It's not? What is it then?"

"I dunno. A big rock, I guess."

"Who lives there?"

"Um . . . penguins. It's a penguin reserve."

"_Penguins?_"

"Yeah, but I still wanna go. It's Pluto! It's cool."

"I think you mean _cold_."

"You're laughing at me, aren't you? I can't see your face but I _know_ you're laughing at me."

Leela bites down hard on her smile.

"No! It sounds adorable. Penguins on Pluto. Fluffy, flappy, fat little baby penguins. It's the cutest thing I've ever heard."

Fry groans.

"I'm never gonna live this down, am I?"

An awful silence falls.

"You're not -"

"I didn't mean -"

They both shut up then because really, what's the point? Fry was right earlier – this is the Games. They only ever end one way.

The soft chime of a parachute alert breaks the silence, and Leela scrambles up to get it. If there is a lump in her throat, she pretends it doesn't exist.

* * *

The parachute haul is a good one. There is clean water, a hot stew with real meat in it, and another heat-reflecting blanket to keep out the cold. Fry gets bandages for his shoulder wound, and more of the antiseptic cream that stopped him bleeding before. Leela gets a blue jello tube that locks around her injured wrist and pulses steadily every sixty seconds. It makes her ache, but it's healing the broken bone. This gift comes accompanied by a shiny new hunting knife. The message couldn't be clearer: sponsors like Crazed Killer Leela.

She touches the sharp tip of the blade, turns the knife over in her hand.

Behind her eye she can see Jrr's blank gaze, feel the resistance as she pushed the fleem into his skull. She can see him rolling around on the floor that same morning, laughing at her and Fry. Teasing them for conserving body heat. Telling her he didn't want to be a killer. She thinks of herself - teasing Fry with him, feeling sorry for him. Making him a promise she didn't even think about until he was already dead.

She feels sick.

All of it – everything they got tonight – was bought at a cost she can hardly stand. If it weren't for Fry she would toss it all out the window. But the other tributes are still out there and she can't afford to look ungrateful when her sponsors have sent her such a wonderful gift. So she smiles woodenly in the direction she guesses a camera must lie, and feigns excitement when she shows the knife off to Fry.

She's in the running again, isn't it great?

Bile is twisting her up from the inside out.

* * *

That night Leela takes watch. Fry tries to argue, but she successfully wears him down. He's too weak, he can't be trusted to stay awake. Besides, he could use the rest. The supplies from the parachute have helped, but Leela is under no illusions. Nothing in the arena can replace the blood Fry has already lost. For all she knows, he could be bleeding internally as well. The cream they were sent only works on surface injuries, after all. His leg was pretty mangled the first time she saw it, and that throwing-star cut deep. If the Games don't end soon . . .

She glances over at him.

He is sleeping beside the fire, which is still going strong, and Leela has put the foil blanket over him. His breathing is shallow.

Leela herself has taken up position by the window, wearing both their jackets to guard against the chill. The cold air blows in through the broken window and makes her cheeks sting. Her discomfort is deliberate – calculated to keep her awake as long as possible – but it's still miserable.

Mrrxxss is building a bonfire by the Cornucopia. She must assume most, if not all, of the Career pack survived the day. Maybe she thinks they were delayed by some trick of the Gamemakers'. Either way, she is busy readying the camp for their return; checking on the stash and gathering wood for a fire she won't need to light until the mammals in the group show up.

Celgnar is hiding in the cover of the trees. His spear glints in the moonlight.

The Gamemakers have arranged a crisp, clear night, perfect for an ambush. After the action-movie drama of the flooded street, they seem to be going for a film noir feel. This kill will be dramatically backlit, an interplay of gold and black set before the gleaming Cornucopia. Hopefully Celgnar and Mrrxxss will provide a suitably cinematic battle. If the effect goes to waste the Gamemakers will be pissed, and Leela has no desire to be on the receiving end of their revenge.

The anthem plays. The faces of the fallen flash in the sky.

Leela stares at her lap so she won't have to see them. She polishes her knife on the bottom of her jacket, and lets her mind wander.

She wants to be somewhere different. Somewhere happy. She thinks of her father, of the way he used to make her stand on his feet and hold his hands, so he could waltz her around the kitchen. It's a nice memory.

Below her, Celgnar and Mrrxxss are waltzing with weapons. They parry each other's blows with a surprising grace. The audience must be enjoying this one, Leela thinks dully.

She tries to retreat into another memory. It doesn't work. Everything she comes up with is twisted and reshaped to reflect her current reality. The muted gleam of her tin can xylophone becomes the shining Cornucopia. Fishing on the mutant lake becomes drowning in the flooded street. Her mother's smile becomes an anguished scream as the Peacekeepers pull her away, and the warmth of Fry's mouth turns into the heat of a raging fever.

She bites down on her knuckle, and fights a growing urge to scream.


	8. Chapter 8

Fry wakes with a gasp when he hears the cannon.

"Leela!"

"Over here," she says dully. "It wasn't me."

"Oh."

Fry sits up, panting. There is a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and his eyes are wide and glassy.

"What happened?" he mumbles.

"Mrrxxss," Leela says. "Celgnar got her."

Leela wasn't even watching when it happened. Which is strange, because she was looking right at the fight. She just wasn't watching it. There were figures ducking and weaving in the moonlight, but they were like marionettes in a puppet show she couldn't pay attention to. When she thinks about it, all she sees are jerky, unconnected movements.

Still, she was looking in their direction. The Gamemakers don't need to know she zoned out, and neither does Fry. She's in control here.

"Go back to sleep," she tells him.

"I can't."

"Well, try."

It comes out sounding snappish, but Fry doesn't seem to mind. He must be getting used to her.

"Will you sit with me?" he asks. "I'm cold."

Leela sighs. It would be smarter if she stayed by the window, but she finds herself sitting down beside Fry anyway.

"What are you thinking about?" he asks.

Leela shrugs.

"Nothing," she says.

It's the truth. She feels empty, hollowed-out. Like she can't keep a hold of anything anymore. Her thoughts skid away from her. Her memories don't feel like her own. It's like something inside her cracked during the bloodbath, and has been slowly splintering ever since. Everything that makes her _her_ is spilling away, and soon there won't be anything left.

Fry prods cautiously at the blue goo around her wrist.

"How's your arm?" he asks.

"Sore."

"I guess that means it's healing."

"Guess so."

"Maybe you'll be better by tomorrow."

"Probably."

Leela knows her one word answers are rude, but she can't summon the energy to make conversation. Not that Fry seems to mind. She wonders vaguely what he _would_ mind. So far he has suffered through outright hostility, awkward silences, teasing, being ordered around . . . and yet he keeps reaching out. He keeps trying. It's weird.

Fry might be getting used to her, Leela thinks, but she isn't sure she'll ever get used to him.

Silence falls between them.

Fry slumps against the wall. His head rests on her shoulder. Their more romantic sponsors will probably find this adorable, but Leela knows better. Fry is just exhausted, and trying to lean away from the wound in his shoulder.

"I had a brother," he says suddenly.

"What?"

"I had a brother. Back in my time. His name was Yancy."

"I . . . o-kay . . ?"

"We fought a lot," Fry continues. "He was older than me."

"Right." Leela shifts uncomfortably. Something more seems to be required of her, but she has no idea what. This whole conversation has taken a turn into strange territory. "I hear brothers do that," she says awkwardly. "Fight a lot."

Fry nods.

"Yeah. But I still think about him sometimes. I like to think that if he knew I was a in a televised death contest, he'd be rooting for me to win. You know?"

Leela tries to be diplomatic.

"I'm sure he would be."

"My parents would probably be yelling at the TV," Fry continues. "Telling me I'm doing everything wrong. My mom was really into sports. Like, _really_ into it. And my dad was really into the military, and survival and stuff. He built a nuclear bunker in our basement, so we'd be ready when the Cold War warmed up and went nuclear, or whatever. He used to say the radiation would turn us all into monkeys, and cockroaches would inherit the Earth."

Leela frowns. She feels uneasy, though she can't explain why.

"Why are you telling me this?"

Fry goes quiet.

"It doesn't matter," he says at last.

But it does matter. The memory comes back unbidden. _If I die here, no-one on this whole planet will remember them. _

Fry said that about his family. Days ago, in another lifetime, when Jrr was still alive.

Leela freezes.

"You're not going to die," she tells him. "Don't talk like that."

Fry stays quiet.

When he does speak, it's not what she's expecting.

"I think . . . I think we should split up tomorrow."

"What? No." Leela scowls. "We've been over this. We're not splitting up yet."

Fry behaves as if he can't hear her.

"In the morning," he says. "You go one way and I go a different way. That's what we should do."

"Are you out of your mind?" Leela pulls away, glaring at him. "You'd be dead in an hour."

"Leela . . ."

Fry frowns at her, like she's grown an extra head and he's not sure if it's something he should comment on or not.

"What?" she snaps.

Fry sighs.

"Leela . . . I'm _dying_."

Cold floods through her.

"No, you're not. You said it yourself, the Games are ending. All you have to do is outlast the rest of us. You still have a chance, Fry, you could still -"

"I'll have the same chance if you leave me behind," Fry points out. "And I won't be slowing you down anymore."

"You're not slowing me down now."

"Are you kidding? You had to drag me here!"

"It was worth it."

"Worth it for what?" Fry is paler than ever. For the first time he looks angry. "Leela, I'm useless. I'm Soylent Green! What are you getting out of keeping me alive? You'd be closer to home if you just let me die!"

Leela forces herself to consider his question. If she tells him they wouldn't have any gifts from sponsors without the love angle, it will play badly. She'll look like a mercenary. If she admits she is on the verge of a mental breakdown and can't stand to be alone with herself, sponsors will immediately retract their support, and the Gamemakers will probably send another building collapse or pack of mutts to punish her. So she settles for something that is close to the truth, but might be more forgivable.

"If I don't make it out of here," she says slowly, "I want it to be you. I want you to be the one who . . . I want you to be the Victor. If I can't be."

Fry stares at her. He opens his mouth, shuts it again. Swallows hard.

What he says next is wholly unexpected.

"I . . . I think I love you."

It's like he hit her with a sledgehammer. Leela reels back, shocked.

"What?"

"It's okay. You don't have to . . . you don't . . . it's not like I . . ." Fry stares miserably at his shoelaces. "I know it's crazy." He glances at her, smiles sadly, and is somber again. "But that's why we have to split up. I'm a dead boy walking. I know you don't wanna hear it, but it's true. I'm dying, and I – I don't want to die alone, Leela." His voice cracks. "If you let me, I'll stay with you until it happens, because I'm scared and I'm lonely, and you make me feel . . . you make me feel safe, even when I'm not safe, and happy, even when I'm not supposed to be happy, and you make me remember why I wanted to win this thing in the first place. And I _can't_. It's not fair." He scrubs at his eyes. He's crying, and trying not to cry, which only makes it worse. "I can't slow you down and I can't make you watch me die. It's not fair. It's not right. It's -"

"You can't talk like this," Leela interrupts. "Not now," she says desperately.

Fry shakes his head.

"_Please_. You have to do this for me. Please, Leela."

"I . . ."

All she can think is _I can't. _But how can she say that? No-one would understand it. She doesn't understand it herself.

She lunges for Fry and tries to kiss him again, hoping it might bring him back to her. But he ducks away, still staring at her with wide, pleading eyes, and Leela realizes there's nothing else she can do. His mind is made up. The Games can only have one winner.

It was supposed to be her. Fry's death was how it was always _supposed_ to end.

Why doesn't it feel that way anymore?

"Okay," she whispers, because there's nothing else she can say. "Tomorrow."

Fry nods, relief washing across his tortured features.

"Tomorrow," he agrees. He slumps against her shoulder again, cold and shaking. "Thank you."

Leela buries her face in his hair. The Gamemakers will be zooming in on her right now, so that audiences across the globe can analyze her expression. Tears will mean she's sweet but weak. Calm will mean she's heartless, the monster they all assume sewer mutants to be. Neither outcome would be good, but both would be better than the truth.

Because what's really coursing through her is white-hot, blinding anger, and Leela doesn't think there is a single person on the surface who would know how to interpret that.

* * *

Fry wakes so early Leela doesn't think he was ever really asleep. But then, she isn't sure she slept either. She is tired to the bone by the time the fake dawn of the arena breaks. She doesn't remember dreaming. She doesn't feel rested. All she feels is empty.

Her arms are locked tight around Fry. When he pries himself free she notes livid marks on his skin, that take longer than they should to fade away.

He looks worse.

In the light of day it's hard to deny what he told her last night. Fry is dying. He is pale, the shadows under his eyes as black as bruises, and his skin is cold and clammy. His lips are completely colorless. As soon as he pulls away from Leela he starts to shake, his body unable to cope with the drop in temperature.

Leela jumps up on instinct and crushes him close again. It helps, but it's obvious he needs more if he's going to get up at all today. So she shoves her shame to one side and straddles him. She rubs his limbs as briskly as she can, and huffs on his cold fingers. The sleazy portion of the audience are probably hooting at their television screens right now, but Leela doesn't care. Let them have their cheap thrills. She's all too aware that there is nothing sexual about what she is doing right now. How can there be? Fry barely has the strength to raise an eyebrow, let alone anything else.

"I must be the unluckiest guy in the world," he manages at last. "I have a beautiful girl on top of me and I can't feel a thing."

Leela rolls her eye. It's a corny line, but she thinks it's supposed to be. She thinks Fry is trying to make her laugh.

"That is a shame." She hesitates. "You really can't feel anything?"

This is not good news. Either his circulatory system is shutting down or he's going into shock. Maybe both. Leela doesn't know – she's no doctor – but there's only so long a person can last without enough blood in their body, and from the sound of it, Fry is far into borrowed time.

He shakes his head.

"I can feel pressure, I guess. But not . . . y'know. Skin." He touches her waist, his thumb tracing a circle. He sighs. "It's like when I had to get that tooth pulled and they numbed up my mouth, and then I bit through my lip. I forgot it was part of my face. I couldn't feel it at _all_." He grins weakly. "Hey, I should get a bunch of piercings. Or a tattoo. I'd be super macho about it."

Leela helps him up.

"I bet."

She wipes his face with her dampened sweater sleeve, and pushes his hair out of his eyes. Right now Fry looks the furthest thing in the world from macho. Not that he ever was to begin with.

"Do you think you can walk?" she asks him.

"I can walk," he says quickly. He is obviously afraid she will change her mind about leaving him. "I just . . . uh . . . need some practice."

Leela lets go. She stomps on the remains of their fire while Fry staggers around the room. After twenty minutes his limbs seem to loosen up. He moves less like a drunk pirate, anyway.

That morning's parachute contains a new container of water. So now they have two, and one of them won't have to risk dying of thirst once they split up. There is no note, but Leela can read Amy's intentions without one. This is their mentor's way of telling them splitting up now is a good idea.

There is some dried fruit in the parachute as well, but Fry can't eat more than a few bites.

"Sorry." He grimaces. "I'm not hungry."

Leela tucks the remainder into his pocket. She wants to cry.

"Maybe later."

"Yeah, maybe."

"Here." She picks up the heat-reflecting foil and wraps it around Fry's torso, under his jacket. "It'll keep you warm."

"But you'll be cold," he argues.

"No, Fry, I won't. I'm warm. And by tonight the Games will be over, and neither of us will need it."

"What if they're not, though?"

Leela scowls.

"They will be."

It's fully light out now, and there is nothing else they can do to delay the inevitable, so they head into the street.

At the corner, Fry hesitates.

"Um . . . so . . . this is it. Which way do you wanna -?"

"I'll go that way." Leela points in the direction of the Cornucopia. "You should head back there."

She indicates the strip of abandoned warehouses where he and Jrr used to camp out. "The water is probably gone by now. It should be safe enough."

She takes one last look at Fry, committing his face to memory. He stares at her, and she realizes he is doing the same thing.

Anger wells up in her again.

She knows what the Gamemakers want. They want a big, dramatic goodbye scene. They want tears and passionate kisses and declarations of love – the kind of thing that will make their pampered audience cry cathartic tears and claim to be broken-hearted. The kind of thing they can set to sad music and show in reruns every year. They want a good show, a neat ending to this tragic love story.

Leela would rather die than give it to them.

It's spite more than anything. Leela doesn't know what she feels for Fry, because she never had the space to figure it out, and now she never will. Why should the surface audience get their neat conclusion? _She_ won't, and neither will Fry. Sooner or later one of them is going to die, scared and alone and in pain. There won't be anything neat about that. And one of them will be left alive, if it all works out. One of them will have to live a lifetime of never being able to look in the mirror, and never being able to forget, and never, ever, truly _knowing_ what could have been. Their lives won't follow some neat story-book trajectory. They're going to be messy and fraught, cut brutally short. If the Gamemakers feel frustrated, like it's not ending right, then let them. Let them feel just a _fraction_ of the way Leela will feel for the rest of her life.

She straightens up.

There is only one thing she can say to Fry that matters now, anyway.

"I'm sorry."

For not being able to save him. For not being able to tell him she loves him back. For hating him at the start of the Games. For playing the love game to win them sponsors, and not letting him know. For killing Jrr. For running away when she was twelve, and never looking back.

Fry nods.

"I'm sorry too," he says.

For loving her? For leaving?

For the Games, Leela suspects. The Games, and life, and everything.

She kisses him, brief and angry with her mouth shut tight. It feels harsh. A full stop smashed in the middle of a sentence.

Then she turns on her heel and walks off.

She doesn't look back.


	9. Chapter 9

Leela walks quickly. An hour passes without her seeing anyone. Then two. It doesn't matter. She doesn't slow her pace. She can't save Fry – can't put back the blood he has already lost – but she can give him an equal chance. She can fight, he can hide. By the end of the day one of them will be safe and one of them will be dead.

She turns the knife over in her hands.

Fry dies, she lives. She lives, Fry dies.

It's starting to feel like the same thing. A double-headed coin. It doesn't matter how it falls, because the outcome is the same either way.

They both lose. They _always_ lose.

Anger bubbles in her guts again. Leela forces herself to hold onto it. She doesn't think she can kill again without something to drive her on, and right now anger is all she has. The Games have drained her of everything else.

There is a black smear of smoke on the horizon, where the Cornucopia lies. The color suggests burning plastic or something toxic. Celgnar would only have to light a small wood fire to stay warm, so what happened?

Maybe it's a decoy. Maybe he wants the other tributes to think he is incapacitated and go for the supplies. Or maybe the Gamemakers pulled something else out of their bag of tricks and he really _is_ incapacitated. There could be some kind of nerve agent in the smoke. The toxic rain they unleashed on Langdon Cobb springs to mind.

Leela tightens her grip on the knife and creeps forward, back pressed against the wall. She feels exposed and uncertain.

Brick dust trickles down her collar. She looks up -

"Hey, Mutant Girl."

The Amphisobian girl back-flips off the wall and lands in the street, grinning.

It's the first time Leela has seen her in a week. She looks awful – smaller and more edgy than Leela remembers, with a feverish glint in her eyes. There is a grayish cast to her green skin, except where it is marred with peeling, half-healed purple blisters.

Off in the distance, Celgnar screams. His rage is unmistakeable, and Leela tenses immediately, but the Amphisobian girl just winks.

"He sounds mad, doesn't he? He must've noticed I burned all the supplies."

"What?"

"It was too easy. I didn't even have to get close. I just tossed one of those – what do you Earthicans call them? Assimov cocktails? - at the pile."

"Molotov cocktails," Leela corrects. She raises the knife. Just because she can't see a weapon doesn't mean her adversary is unarmed. The friendly tone of this conversation is weird. It's probably intended to lull her into a false sense of security, but it won't work. This close to the finish line there is no way Leela is letting her guard down. "What do you want?" she demands.

The Amphisobian girl folds her arms.

"The same thing you do. An _end_."

Leela frowns.

"I don't want an ally," she rebuffs. "If you want to take on Celgnar you can do it yourself."

The girl snorts.

"Yeah, not what I'm asking for, Mutant Girl. I can take the Martian. But I think I'll let him get hungry first. It makes for a better show, don't you think?"

Her gaze locks on Leela. Her eyes are alight. The audience will probably think she's mad or malicious – this kind of taunting bravado always goes down well - but Leela can see the truth. Nothing the girl is projecting is real. She's not mad, she's not cruel, she's not gloating. She's _desperate._ She wants to go home, and she's decided the only way to do it is to play the game. Up to now, she's been hiding out alone – and if those blisters are any indication, she suffered for the tactic as much as Leela did. But now the end is coming, and she has to make sure she's in the final showdown. She has to make the Gamemakers like her. So she set fire to the supplies, instead of Celgnar, because the strongest tribute has to make it to the final two. She had the element of surprise, but she only startled Leela - instead of snapping her neck from above - because she knows the audience want a confrontation.

Suddenly Leela understands what the girl meant when she asked for an end. She wasn't looking for an ally. She wants a fight, here and now. She wants it to be over.

Leela holds her gaze. She nods. It's a tiny jerk of the head – the cameras might not even pick it up – but the Amphisobian girl does. Her expression softens into gratitude, just for an instant . . . then Leela lunges for her and that gratitude disappears.

Leela slashes at her with the knife and the Amphisobian girl screams, ribbons of red unfurling from her hands as she uses them to block the attack. Leela pulls back, goes in again sharp and quick for a stab to the gut. But the girl side-steps, twists right and comes up behind her. A fistful of hair is torn away from Leela's scalp. Bloody hands gouge at her eye. They close around the cyclops's throat and Leela sees stars. Her lungs are burning. Warm, slick red blood gets smeared across her face and neck as she struggles. The smell of it is in her nostrils, it's soaking her shirt the same way it did when Jrr . . . when Jrr . . . _when she killed Jrr._

She lashes out with the knife, swipes at empty air as her vision starts to dim. With her free hand she claws at the fingers around her throat.

She kicks out blindly and there is a yelp of pain. The hands on her throat fall away and Leela sucks in air. She throws herself at her opponent before her lungs are halfway full, pins the green girl between her knees and slugs her in the face. If Amphisobians had bones, the girl's nose would've broken for sure. But they don't. Her face simply squishes inward, accepting the blow. Blood spurts from a split lip, but the girl doesn't bruise the way Leela wants.

They roll over, off-balance.

The gutters are still clogged and reeking after the flood. Mud matts in Leela's hair. The girl spits blood in her eye, blinding her.

A blow to the stomach follows. Leela lands hard on her back, the knife flying out of her hand. She rakes her nails over her opponent's skin, feeling the blisters burst beneath her fingernails. The Amphisobian girl hisses.

"What happened to your human?" she gasps.

"Dead," Leela says shortly. It's an obvious attempt to wrong-foot her, and she can't afford to be intimidated right now. She needs to get back to the knife. She has to take this girl down before time runs out.

The Amphisobian girl grins.

"Liar," she shoots back. "He's not dead. No cannon, Mutant Girl. But you're not with him anymore, so he can't have long. What got him?"

Leela scowls.

"Nothing got him," she lies. "He's covering me. Shoot her in the head, Fry!" she yells.

There's no-one to hear, but the Amphisobian girl turns her head anyway, and gets kicked in the jaw for her trouble. She clutches at her windpipe, coughing gobs of blood into the street.

"Dying," she wheezes. "Knew it. I'll get him next."

Leela kicks her again.

The girl laughs.

"You _do_ like him! I thought he was just your meal ticket." Her expression becomes one of mock pity. "A human though? Mutant Girl, that is never going to work." She hops back, out of the range of Leela's fist. "Don't worry. I'll make it quick." She pulls a thin wooden reed from her pocket. A blowpipe. "He'll be dead in a minute. He won't know what hit him, I promise."

Leela realizes with horror that the girl's expression isn't mock pity. It's the real thing. And she just offered to give Fry a quick death. Why would she do that? The Gamemakers won't want that.

Frustration wells up in her again. The Gamemakers. The Gamemakers. _The Gamemakers_. The Amphisobian girl is still playing the game, still trying to win by the Gamemakers' rules. Whatever she really feels is being buried under the cruel facade of a would-be Victor. But she feels something, that much is clear. It's not enough to stop her killing them, but it's not consistent with the way the Games are played, either. It's weird, it's wrong, it's . . . selfless. Why would she be selfless, now? It doesn't make sense.

Leela tries to knock the blowpipe out of the girl's hand, and misses.

"Leave Fry alone," she grunts.

"Are those your last words?"

The Amphisobian girl slots a dart into the blowpipe and raises it to her lips.

"No," Leela snarls. "My last words are -"

"I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry."

The voice comes from behind the Amphisobian girl. And then the tip of a blade bursts through her heart.

She freezes in place, makes a tiny sound – a squeak of surprise that dies before it leaves the back of her throat. Then she topples forward onto Leela.

The cannon tolls, _boom_, and the sound leaves Leela screaming in her own head. Blood is soaking her face and neck again, the weight of someone she killed is pressing down on her . . . .

No. No. This isn't Jrr, she isn't there again. She didn't kill the Amphisobian girl. That was . . . that was . . .

Fry.

She heard him. That was his voice. _I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry. _That was Fry.

Hope and fear surge through her in the same instant. Leela pushes the Amphisobian girl off her.

"Fry? Fry!"

He is on his knees in the street. His breathing is labored, and he still has a white-knuckled grip on Leela's knife. It must have slipped out of the Amphisobian girl's back when she fell forward.

Leela kneels down in front of him.

"Fry?" she says nervously. "Fry, it's me."

He isn't hysterical like before, but he's clearly in shock. It takes him longer than it should to focus on Leela's face.

"Leela," he mumbles at last. "I did it, I . . . I . . ."

"I know."

Leela helps him up. She pries the knife from his hand, then wipes off the blade and tucks it inside her jacket while Fry isn't looking. He probably never wants to see his murder weapon again – Leela didn't – but they can't afford to get rid of it.

Fry is still pretty spaced-out.

"I didn't mean to," he mumbles. "I had to. I had to."

Leela swallows. There is a painful lump in her throat, and she knows it has nothing to do with almost being strangled.

"I know," she says softly. "I get it, Fry, I really do. You had to."

Fry nods. His gaze clears. He touches the bruises on her neck, his fingers hovering uncertainly over the marks. Then he hugs her, burying his face in her hair. Leela listens to his heartbeat, gauges his temperature against her own skin. It's not good. He's cold to the touch.

"Fry." She gently pries him off. "We have to go. We can't stay here."

Fry nods again, like he doesn't have the energy for words. He stares down at the corpse of the Amphisobian girl.

Her eyes are wide, shocked. There is a circular bloodstain, deep crimson, on the front of her shirt. Where her heart would be. She is still holding the blowpipe in one hand, the poison darts in the other.

Leela gathers up both items, then carefully shuts the girl's eyes. She doesn't know why. She only knows that she respected this girl. She was a good fighter, and she was willing to defy the Gamemakers to give Fry a quick death. She didn't deserve to die in the dirt for some stranger's amusement.

Leela doesn't realize she's talking until the words have already left her mouth. But it doesn't matter. She wouldn't take them back anyway. Not now.

"I'm sorry too," she says to the Amphisobian girl.

* * *

Fry is quiet as they trudge toward the Cornucopia. He is leaning heavily on Leela, obviously weaker than when she left him that morning. But he doesn't suggest they split up again, and neither does she.

They hear the churr of chopper blades behind them. An automated hovercraft, come to retrieve the body of the latest tribute to die.

They keep walking, and eventually the sound fades away.

"You came back," Leela says at last.

"I know."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I got this feeling." Fry frowns. "Like something was wrong," he elaborates. "Like . . . like you needed me. I can't explain."

"You came all that way on a _feeling_?"

Leela doesn't know why she's even surprised. This is no more illogical than anything else Fry has done.

He shrugs.

"You needed me."

"But how did you know? You can't have _known_ that -"

"I told you, I can't explain it. I just knew."

Leela gives up.

"Well, thanks," she tells him. "You saved my life."

This doesn't seem to cheer Fry.

"I killed that girl," he says quietly. "I'm a murderer."

Leela draws a deep breath.

"I killed Jrr," she responds. "Remember? And Brett, when he hit you with that throwing star. You gave me the gun. We did it together, to _survive_, Fry. She would've done the same."

"Not if she didn't have to."

Leela stops abruptly in the street.

"You did what you had to do," she says fiercely. "We all did. You can't think like this."

She kisses him, mainly to cut him off. Her hair came loose in her encounter with the Amphisobian girl, and when Fry leans into the kiss it provides a curtain, screening them momentarily from the cameras.

"You can't talk like this," she whispers urgently. She digs her nails into his wrist, to punctuate the point, and Fry gasps against her mouth. It's a perfectly natural reflex but it makes Leela's blood jump, heat pooling strangely inside her. It occurs to her that it would feel good to make him do that again.

Why is she thinking about this now?

Whatever the reason it came into her head, it seems like a similar thought invaded Fry's brain – which is good, because he now looks dazed and distracted. He might not heed her warning about the wrong kind of talk, but he at least seems to have lost his train of thought. It might be the best Leela can ask for.

"Let's move," she says.

"Where?" Fry asks.

The word comes out exhausted and inflectionless. It's not that he won't follow her – Leela is beginning to understand that Fry would follow her anywhere – but it's obvious catching up to her and killing the Amphisobian girl has robbed him of whatever energy he managed to recoup that morning. Stubborn loyalty will only carry him so much further.

"Somewhere safe," Leela tells him. "Somewhere I can leave you while I go kill Celgnar."

Predictably, Fry hates her plan.

"No," he says immediately. "Leela, no way! It's too dangerous. You can't go! What if something happens? What if – what if – what if you need me again, or, or -"

Leela squeezes his shoulder. Her dad used to do that to her, when he needed her to be strong, or brave. It's a reassuring gesture, she thinks, and that's what Fry needs right now. Getting agitated will only make his condition worse.

"You can't fight," she tells him calmly. "You won't make it as far as the Cornucopia, Fry. Even if I did need your help, you wouldn't be strong enough to give it to me. In fact, I'd end up having to defend _you_, and that'd probably get us both killed. You're a liability. I'm sorry, but it's true."

She has to make this sound like the only reasonable option, because it is. Her fear of risking death alone is not enough to justify dragging Fry into the line of fire.

Fry isn't giving in without a fight though.

"But what if Celgnar -"

"I won't let him."

"But -"

Leela can feel her calm beginning to crack.

"I won't get caught like that again," she snaps. "And if I do – if Celgnar takes me down - I'll take him down with me. And then you'll win," she says simply.

"I don't want to win if you're dead!"

"Well, you will."

Leela turns away, scanning their surroundings for a safehouse. She's glad he can't see her face.

Fry grabs her wrist.

"You can't go," he insists. "I won't let you. Something else will get Celgnar. The Gamemakers, or, or . . . something. We can wait it out, and -"

"And you'll die," Leela says harshly. "We don't have time for this, Fry. You're dying."

"Then maybe you should let me! Maybe you should take that knife and stick it in my heart right now."

"That's not funny."

"It wasn't a joke." Fry glares at her. "We can't both win, Leela. We should just get it over with."

"I don't care." The anger is back, twisting Leela apart from the inside. "I don't care," she says again, for the pure vindictive thrill of it. It feels like spitting in the Gamemakers' faces. She grips Fry's shoulders, glaring right back at him.

"I won't kill you," she continues. "And I won't let you die. No matter what they do."

Fry frowns. Leela isn't surprised. She just warned him not to question the Gamemakers, and here she is openly defying them.

"Leela . . ." he says nervously.

He stops. His leg collapses under him and he starts to shake.

Leela's swift reaction is all that prevents him falling to the ground. At first she doesn't understand – his leg is mostly healed now, why would he fall? – but then she hears it too.

Howling. Snarls.

Suddenly it makes sense. Fry isn't hurt. His body is reacting to an old hurt, to the fear that sound creates. His leg. That's where the mutts bit him. It's what almost killed him the first time.

He isn't supposed to live, and Leela isn't supposed to talk the way she just did. And this is why. _The Gamemakers._

"Run!" Fry yells.

Leela ignores him. If the mutts are coming for them, they won't escape them by running. They'll only exhaust themselves. She throws herself in front of Fry instead, and pulls the knife out of her jacket. She wishes she hadn't lost the laser gun in the flood. Fry was good with it, and it would have been nice to have some back-up.

The mutts round the corner.

They are huge. For the first time, Leela misses Jrr for reasons other than his friendship. His brute strength would have been better than an automatic weapon against these things. The mutts are like something out of a nightmare – bear-sized, hulking hell hounds with vicious canines and jaws that could crush bone, easy. Their eyes are small and reddened, the pupils constricted to maddened points.

There are five of them, and the first wastes no time in lunging for her as soon as it gets close. Leela rams the knife into its eye socket and kicks out with her boot, knocking it off-course. The knife slides out gleaming red and the creature falls, convulsing wildly on the ground before it falls still. The rest of the pack turns on her. The second-largest immediately assumes the vacant role of pack leader. It prepares to spring first.

Leela braces herself, brandishing the knife.

_Take it down_, she tells herself. _Take it down, take it down, take it down. _

She might be about to die – there's no way she can possibly survive this – but her brain won't let her dwell on that point. Her whole world has narrowed to the knife in her hand and the smell of blood in her nostrils. She's going to protect herself – protect Fry – or die trying.

The mutt prepares to spring – and then it stops. Its nose twitches. A growl sounds, low in its throat, and it backs off a step. When another mutt attempts to break rank the leader snaps at it, tearing off an ear and sending the dissenter groveling away on its belly.

Leela feints a few times with the knife, but only gets half-hearted snaps in return. The mutts are wary. Of what, though? Not her. They're maddened attack dogs. Losing one of their number to a knife won't be enough to put them off their prey. So what is? What instinct is strong enough to override the training the Gamemakers forced them through?

Leela lowers the knife and steps out. The mutts retreat – but one flanking the group darts in behind her and snaps at Fry. Leela wheels round in time and slashes it across the muzzle, sending it off howling.

They're not afraid of Fry. Just her. Why?

Leela pats her jacket with her free hand. What does she have that . . . Her fingers find the blowpipe she took from the Amphisobian girl. The pipe, and the poison darts. Poison. _Poison_. She waves one of the darts experimentally, letting the wind catch the scent.

The mutts go crazy. They turn on each other; biting, snarling, growling . . . but coming no closer to Leela. Whatever this poison is – whether the Amphisobian Girl secreted it herself or had it sent to her by a sponsor – the mutts have encountered it before, and have a visceral reaction to it. They _hate_ it.

Leela pulls the second dart from her jacket and thrusts it into Fry's pocket. She backs him into the door of the building behind them. It's not perfect, but it'll have to do. The mutts won't stay wary forever. Sooner or later they'll overcome their aversion to the poison and attempt an attack.

"Get inside," she says under her breath. "Get to the first floor. Don't go any higher. I'll head them off."

Fry stumbles. He has been holding onto her arm to keep himself upright, but his grip is starting to slacken.

"Fry. Did you hear me?" This is one of the biggest drawbacks to having only one eye, Leela thinks. She can't keep one eye on the mutts and one on her injured friend, the way a human could. "Fry," she says again.

He doesn't respond.

Leela risks a glance behind her, and immediately regrets it. Fry is swaying on the spot, deaf and blind to his surroundings. His eyes are unfocused. Stress and fear have accelerated what the blood loss started, and his body is coming apart under the strain. He's either going to collapse or have a seizure.

He can't stop it. Leela can't stop it.

They're both going to die.

There's only one thing she can do. It's crazy. It's suicide. But then, so was entering the Games.

Leela puts her hand on Fry's heart, testing his pulse. It's weak. She slips the second poison dart into his pocket and hugs him tight. With any luck, the mutts will consider him an unappetizing meal now.

Especially when they can chase her instead.

She vaults out of the circle of mutts and lands hard in the street, the impact jarring her knees. But there's no time to recover. She has to run. She screams out senseless noise – anything to get their attention – and waves her arms, even though it goes against every instinct she has. It works. The mutts peel away from Fry and come after her instead.

Now all she can do is run, and pray she makes it out of this alive.

Far behind her, Fry staggers. Once. Twice.

And then he falls forward, face down in the dirt, and doesn't move again.


	10. Chapter 10

The smoke hits her first. It's thick and black, and it coats her lungs like tar.

The fire is still raging at the Cornucopia. The pile of supplies has become a blue-orange bonfire, but the flames have spread somehow. Maybe the Careers had paraffin lamps like she did, and they spilled, or maybe the Amphisobian girl's Molotov cocktail leaked flammable liquid over a wider surface area than she intended. Either way, the Cornucopia is completely encircled.

Celgnar has taken refuge on top of the metal structure, with whatever weapons he could salvage from the fire. When he sees Leela – running for her life with a pack of maddened mutts on her heels – he swears. Leela assumes the stream of words he screams out at her are swearwords, anyway. He has fallen back on his native Martian, and she can't understand a word of it.

The bullet that zings past her ear speaks the universal language of violence though.

Leela keeps running. She can't duck or weave – she doesn't have the strength to do anything but run, straight and fast, and hope to outpace the mutts. They're gaining on her. The smoke in her lungs is slowing her down, making it hard to breathe. Her muscles are screaming. Her only hope is to keep moving – too fast for Celgnar to hit, too fast for the mutts to catch.

Super-heated air hits her in the face.

A second bullet flies past her, but the hot air warps its trajectory. It hits one of the mutts instead.

The ring of fire is dead ahead. The mutts are closing in behind.

Sweat drips into her eye. She coughs and stumbles – _don't fall, don't fall _. . .

She's almost there, almost clear of the fire. All she needs to do is jump. And then -

Pressure. Pain. The feeling closes on her calf like steel jaws, and Leela screams.

She kicks out in desperation. The mutt falls away, but its jaws are still shut tight on her leg, and a chunk of her flesh comes away with it. It tears off with sickening ease; a mouthful of thick, bloody jelly that can't be part of her, can't belong to her . . .

Her head is spinning.

She wants to vomit, to black out, to die . . .

She falls into the fire.

Leela throws her arms up automatically to shield her face. The instant she spends in the inferno feels like an eternity; searing hot and suffocating.

And then she is through and gasping on the other side.

She drops and rolls, and rolls again, crushing the flames that still lick at her clothes and hair. There are holes burnt out of her clothes and she reeks of singed hair. Her palms and forearms are tender to the touch, heat still building beneath the skin even as the surface layers turn red and shiny.

She has rolled into the mouth of the Cornucopia.

The air is hotter in here. The metal buckles and groans, but Celgnar can't reach her, and the mutts are snarling on the other side of the flames. It's the safest place she could be.

Her stomach pitches and she vomits pure bile. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, then rolls over to get a better look at the wound on her leg.

There is blood everywhere. It looks bad, but closer inspection reveals the mutt's teeth have missed any major arteries. It's a flesh wound: ugly and liable to turn septic if she doesn't get it treated soon, but not immediately life-threatening. She thinks of Fry. The throwing star hit him in the chest, and the blood was bright red. It gushed out like a geyser every time they took the pressure off, until they managed to repair the wound. She isn't bleeding even half so much. And her lightheadedness is probably caused more by smoke inhalation than blood loss. She can survive this.

Leela tears off the sleeve of her sweater and cinches it tight around the missing flesh. If she avoids putting any weight on her leg, she can move. It'll be slow going, but better than nothing.

The mutts are howling. On the roof of the Cornucopia, Celgnar is screaming. Threatening to kill her, probably. Every so often he fires off a shot.

Leela grits her teeth and begins to crawl deeper into the Cornucopia. Smoke and shadows swallow her up as the walls narrow around her, curling in to form the tip of the horn. Blisters the size of plums are swelling on her forearms. She drags herself on, fighting the urge to scream as the concrete peels strips off her burned skin.

When she gets to the tip of the horn, it's not hard to kick away a sheet of metal and worm her way out. It makes a noise, but Celgnar doesn't notice. Not when the entire structure is groaning in the heat. The metal bangs and groans as it is slowly warped out of shape. On the roof, the rubber of Celgnar's boots is melting. He isn't screaming anymore – he's coughing too hard for that. He must think Leela is still inside, licking her wounds or passed out from the smoke, because all his attention is on the mutts now. They're inching closer, waiting for a break in the flames. Preparing to jump.

She doesn't have much time.

There is a plinth nearby. A tribute stood here a week ago. (A week? Has it been a week? Or more? Her thinking is fuzzy – the Games feel like they've lasted forever, and the time before seems distant and unreal.) But Leela remembers what the Gamemakers told them, remembers the warning that is passed down to the tributes every year. _If you leave your place before the countdown ends, you'll be blown to smithereens. _

There are explosives buried in the ground.

It's not a weapon a tribute is ever supposed to use. It's just another way for the Gamemakers to keep them in their place. But the choice facing her now is to add to the list of reasons the Gamemakers hate her, or be torn apart by their hell-hounds. It's not a choice, she tells herself.

Besides . . . she still hasn't heard the cannon. If it hasn't gone off yet, then Fry isn't dead yet. Leela isn't sure why this matters, why it drives her to work faster, try harder, _keep on living _when the best way to help him would be to die here and now. All she knows is that it does.

The ground is disturbed by the foot of the pedestal, where the charges were set. Leela digs through the dirt, flinging fistfuls of earth to the side. Her fingers close around a smooth, waxy stick in a nest of wiring. She rips it out.

Her eye is streaming. Her lungs are on fire.

She lurches around to the mouth of the Cornucopia. The mutts have broken through the flames, followed the scent of her blood into the Cornucopia itself. Celgnar is on his knees, woozy from the smoke. He must be out of ammo, because he has thrown aside the gun and is half-leaning on his spear. He sees Leela and starts to rise.

Leela lifts her arm.

It feels wrong ending it like this, doing it like this. It's not a mercy killing and it's not a fair fight. It's just . . . death. Painful, ugly death.

She throws the explosive into the mouth of the Cornucopia and drops to the ground.

Leela doesn't see the explosion. It's too bright, too loud, too close. She shields her face and neck with her arms, but the aftershock tears through her anyway, a wave of sound and heat and noise that feels like it could punch the heart clean out of her chest. It strips her skin raw and leaves her ears ringing. When the cannon tolls for Celgnar, she can't hear it.

Her mouth tastes like ash. Everything is burned, and burning, and the world is swimming around her. She tries to sit up and it all goes black.

* * *

It's hard to say how long she was out.

Her surroundings are smoldering when Leela opens her eye again, and the air is still thick and hot. She tries to take a breath and her chest immediately constricts, forcing the air back out in a violent coughing fit. Her throat feels scalded all the way down to her lungs.

Her balance is off-kilter too. Her right ear is crusted with dried blood, and her hearing on that side has a murky, underwater feel. The explosion must have blown out her eardrum.

She is supposed to get up. There was something she needed to do, but she can't remember what it was, or why it mattered.

They should fire the cannon, she thinks. End it now. End _her_ now. It's time, isn't it?

She closes her eye again.

Ash is drifting through the air. Bleached white flakes of it stick to her cheeks. Some of those flakes are Celgnar, and that thought would have made Leela want to scrape her own skin off, once. But now it doesn't seem to matter. What difference does it make? They're all dead, really, all the tributes, and they always were. They were just too stupid to know it.

_Fry isn't dead. _

The thought arrives fully-formed in her head, and it jolts her because it has feeling behind it. It's sharp. Insistent.

_Fry isn't dead. _

That's true, isn't it? It must be true. The hovercraft hasn't come for her yet, she isn't hearing fanfare and celebratory cannon fire and Abner Doubledeal's smug congratulations booming out from a hidden speaker. Which means she isn't this year's Victor. Not yet.

_They're waiting for him to die. _

Leela drags herself to her knees, and starts to crawl. Her body protests, but she ignores it. She can feel her heartbeat again, hard and fast against her ribcage. She doesn't have a plan. The only thing she knows is that if Fry is still alive, she's not alone.

Her progress is pitiful.

The Gamemakers are probably laughing at her. Leela knows how they think. They'll zoom the cameras out until she is nothing at all, just a tiny, insignificant speck in a ruined world. Or maybe they'll focus in on one particularly pathetic detail, like the burned skin of her hands, or the trail of blood behind her. She made one of the most thrilling kills of the Games, but she broke an unwritten rule to do it. They'll try to make her look as weak as possible in the aftermath.

Not that it will take much trying. She might not be dying, but she's in a sorry state.

This is how they'll punish her, she thinks blearily. She defied the Gamemakers for Fry, over and over, but it won't matter, because they'll make sure the audience sees how futile it was. When Fry dies, they'll mine every moment of her grief and then they'll airlift a broken girl out of the arena, and put a crown on her head. To mock her. To show everyone what winning is really worth, when the girl who wanted to win can't even remember why.

Fry is lying motionless where she left him. For one awful moment Leela thinks maybe he _is_ dead – maybe the Gamemakers silenced the cannon and left his body here to mess with her – but then she gets close enough to make out his breathing.

"Fry."

The word comes out half a cough, making her throat sting.

She turns him over. His eyes are closed, but when she shakes him by the shoulder they flutter open, wide and unfocused like a boy already dead.

It unnerves her.

"Fry," she says again, more urgently this time. "Fry, _wake up_."

She shakes him again, and his gaze comes back into focus.

"L – Leela?"

Leela nods. Her throat feels like sandpaper. Her eye is still streaming. She must look as bad as she feels, because Fry's forehead creases in concern.

"Oh no," he whispers. "You're dead too. No . . . no . . ."

Leela grabs his hand. It's cold and limp in her grasp, and Fry doesn't seem to register her touch at all. She swallows hard.

"I'm not dead," she rasps. "Neither are you. Can you . . . can you sit up?"

Fry shakes his head, then blinks drunkenly, as if the effort made him dizzy.

Leela grits her teeth. She won't end it like this, with Fry lying discarded in the road and her kneeling over him like his wailing widow. That's the visual the Gamemakers want, and Leela won't let them have it.

She summons all her strength instead, and uses it to stand. To drag Fry across the street and prop him against a wall before she collapses in a heap beside him.

Moving him was a bad idea. He slips out of consciousness again, and only wakes when she shakes him hard. But he _does_ wake. He's not dead. Not yet.

"Leela," he mumbles, more relieved this time than scared. His hand twitches, like he wants to touch her but doesn't have the strength. "You came back."

Leela nods.

"You're still alive."

It's the only explanation she can give. Fry seems to get it though. He smiles weakly at her.

"I know. You did it, Leela. You kept me alive. And I kept you alive." His hand finds hers, fingers curl around her own. "And now you have to kill me."

Time seems to stop.

Leela can't think – can't process what he's saying, can't fight him on it. All she can do is watch Fry's fingers unfurl, watch him tip the poisoned darts into her hand. The darts she planted on him to fend off the mutts. The ones she took from the Amphisobian girl.

The girl wanted to use them to kill Fry.

_Dead in a minute. _That's what she promised.

No pain.

But . . . she can't. She _can't_.

She finds a word at last.

"No."

"Leela, you _have_ to." Fry squeezes her hand, frustration evident on his face. "You know you do. We can't both win!"

"Then we both lose!"

The words come out too loud, ringing in the silence, and they scald her throat. But Leela doesn't try to take them back. It's the truth, isn't it? It's what she's been thinking all along: if only one of them wins, then both of them lose. There won't be a Victor, not for her and Fry. Just the one who dies, and the one who has to live with it.

And then it hits her. The way to make the Gamemakers feel it.

"We both lose," she murmurs.

She uncaps the poison darts and puts one back in Fry's hand, curling his fingers around it and raising it level with her own heart. She holds the other up to his chest.

"I don't want to win. Not without you."

Horror dawns on Fry's face.

"No. No way." Under her splayed fingers, Leela can feel his heart pick up. "I won't."

Leela hesitates. She could yell at him, or try to make him see her point of view, but there's no time. They have to act before the Gamemakers do.

So she plays the only card she can. It doesn't feel fair, but then, _nothing_ about this is fair.

Fry's hair is stiff with dirt and sweat. Leela pushes it out of his eyes and touches his cheek. The gesture is so gentle it feels foreign, but it works. Fry's anger becomes uncertainty.

"Wha . . . what are you . . . ?"

"Do you love me?"

Fry swallows. There is a long, long pause.

"Yes," he whispers at last.

Leela rests her forehead against his and shuts her eye. It's a tiny respite, an instant in which she can pretend the arena doesn't exist.

"Then trust me," she breathes back.

Fry shivers.

"Together?" he asks.

"On three," Leela confirms.

Fry nods.

"Okay."

He takes a deep, shuddering breath.

"Three," Leela says quietly.

She presses her lips to his then pulls away, afraid to prolong the kiss.

"Two," Fry mumbles.

He's really going to do it. He's really going to die for her.

And she's going to die for him.

_I'm sorry, Mom_, Leela thinks.

"One -"

"STOP! STOP!" Abner Doubledeal's wild, panicked voice bursts out of hidden speakers. "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND VARIATIONS THEREUPON, I GIVE YOU THE _JOINT VICTORS _OF THIS YEAR'S CITIZENSHIP GAMES – TURANGA LEELA AND PHILIP J FRY!"


	11. Chapter 11

She is lying down, and her limbs feel stiff and heavy, like she's slept for a hundred years. She has to get up. She's going to sleep through her morning run around Lake Mutagenic. She's going to be late for work.

Isn't she?

No. No, that's not right.

Leela opens her eye, and finds herself staring at a wall so white it hurts. She turns her head away.

A bedside locker. A vase as clear as crystal, filled with clear, clear water and colorful plants.

The stems are green, but the tops are orange, yellow, pink. They curl like scraps of silk.

Pretty. Delicate.

The air in here has a harsh, chemical smell, but the plants are sweet and fragrant, like the perfume Linda wore at her interview.

Leela blinks.

Interview. There was an interview . . .

She puts out a hand. If she can touch something she can ground herself in the world again and it will all come back to her, it will all make sense . . .

There is plastic tubing taped to the back of her hand, burrowing into her skin.

_They're dripping chemicals into her body. _

Horror courses through her and Leela snaps upright, ripping the thing off.

The Games. The mutts. The explosion. _Fry._

It all comes back to her in a rush, Jrr's teeth and Fry's blood and the brick dust from the building collapse all jumbled together in her head. She doesn't know whether to cough or cry or fight or scream.

"Leela," someone says, and the real world intrudes on her memories. She sees rubbery green skin and a bald head and -

The Amphisobian girl. The Amphisobian girl has come to kill her, she's come to kill Fry . . .

"Leela!" the voice gasps again, and she realizes it's not a girl – it's a boy. Last year's victor, Kif Kroker.

"I'm not here to hurt you," he gasps, and Leela sees that she has wound the plastic tubing around Kif Kroker's neck and is strangling him with it. She doesn't remember deciding to do this. It must have been instinct.

Reluctantly, she lets him go.

Once his head has shrunk back to normal, he gives her a reproachful look.

"That really wasn't necessary, you know."

"Why are you here? Why am I here? Where _is_ here?"

Kif sighs.

"You're in hospital," he says. "Recovering after the Games. You remember the Games, don't you?"

Leela nods.

"Hospital?" she says guardedly.

So the white white walls and pretty plants are hospital, on the surface. It makes a kind of sense.

"Hospital," Kif confirms. "There was no need to rip out the IV, by the way. It was only fluids."

When Leela only stares blankly at him, he indicates her bleeding hand. His face softens.

"I know how confusing this must be for you. But you're safe now. I promise."

Leela ignores this. She was in the Games. She won't ever feel safe again.

"Where's Fry?" she demands.

She tries to get up again and Kif winces, gently pushing her back down.

"In another part of the hospital," he tells her. "The Gamemakers would prefer not to reunite you until your interview, but he's safe too. You saved his life. What's the last thing you remember, Leela?"

Her name sounds all wrong in his mouth, in that quiet, gentle tone. It doesn't fit her anymore. Leela was a girl who loved her mother and missed her father and _felt _things. The girl who put a fleem through Jrr's skull and kissed Fry for food and turned Celgnar into a screaming fireball can't be Leela as well.

"I remember the poison," she says "The darts. We won."

It doesn't feel real.

Kif nods.

"After that?" he prompts.

Leela frowns as more memories float to the surface. Hovercraft engine-noise and celebratory cannon-fire, and Fry seizing violently as they tried to tear him away from her. White-clad strangers with bright lights and hands everywhere, and the sting of needles and the beeping of machinery, and . . . cameras. Cameras in her face and at her elbow. She kept trying to get to Fry on the table, but they were always in her way. She had to kick and punch and spit – she stops and stares at her knuckles when she remembers this, but the skin is pink and unbroken, already healed – and then she got to the table.

They cut a line in his chest with metal teeth, and then they cracked his ribs apart and lit his insides up like lightning.

The memory hits her like a punch to the guts. She doubles over, dry-heaving, and Kif thrusts a paper dish at her. Leela bats it aside.

"They cut him open," she gasps. "And they stuck . . . they stuck . . . _they were torturing him!_"

"No, no," Kif says hurriedly. "Leela, his heart stopped. That was the only way to get it started again." He grimaces. "You didn't understand. It's not your fault. But you became . . . ah . . . um . . . _distressed_," he says delicately, "and your doctors decided it was best to sedate you."

Leela goes cold.

"I attacked them."

"Yes."

"And the camera people. I attacked them too."

"Yes. But you were in a state of shock. You were dehydrated and suffering from blood loss, smoke inhalation . . . any number of things detrimental to your anatomy. As Amy said in her statement to the press" - here Kif slows down and looks her dead in the eye - "it's clear you didn't know what you were doing."

Amy gave a statement to the press before her tribute was even conscious. There is only one reason she would do that. _Damage control. _

Leela feels a shadow of foreboding.

"Where is Amy?" she says. "She's my mentor. I should see her."

"She's with Fry. She's his mentor too, remember? And his condition was much less stable than yours," Kif reminds her gently.

Under the statement, Leela hears the one Kif is really telling her. Fry was the one the Gamemakers wanted dead from the start. Fry is the one who would raise the least suspicion if he succumbed to his wounds. Leela kept the cameras on him in the hovercraft, and if she knows her mentor at all, Amy hasn't left his side since.

They're not trapped in the arena anymore, but they're still playing the game.

Leela looks around. She can't see any recording equipment in this stark white room, but from the careful way Kif is talking, she knows it must be there.

"Can we go for a walk?" she tries. "I need some air."

Kif shakes his head.

"You have to rest. Doctor's orders."

"I just woke up," Leela points out. "They fixed me up, anyway. I'm fine. I can't just lay around in bed all day."

Kif's mouth twitches in what might be a smile. If so, it's the first Leela has ever seen from him.

"I know it's hard to get used to," he tells her, "but you're not in the sewer anymore, Leela. No-one expects you to get up and go to work as soon as you can stand."

"How did you -"

Kif raises his arm and pulls back his sleeve. There is an old scar on his wrist, a black brand seared into the skin. Leela doesn't recognize the symbol.

"The rubber plantations on Amphibios 9," Kif says in explanation. "I worked there, the same way I imagine you worked in the sewers of Earth. Because there was no alternative. Because I had a family to feed." He smiles thinly. "Because I knew nothing else. It's very different here. You'll see."

The only thing she wants to see is Fry, but Leela doesn't know if she can say that without it being misconstrued somehow. She's still trying to get her bearings in this strange new place, and knowing her every word is being listened to doesn't help. She can't afford to slip up. Not now. Not when the game is still on and she is no longer sure of the rules.

"You're right. I'm tired," she lies.

Kif nods.

"Get some rest. I've been doing a crossword while you sleep. You could help me, if you'd like. Can you read?"

Leela nods.

"Then what do you think of four across?" Kif's tone is neutral. "I'm stuck."

He passes over the pad of paper.

_YOU'RE IN TROUBLE_, Leela reads. _YOU MADE THEM LOOK STUPID._

"I know," she says. She takes the pen and scrawls an answer, trying not to seem too hurried.

_WHAT DO I DO?_

"That's clever," Kif hums. He pencils in another sentence. "And now 'tarantula' fits for nine down."

He rotates the pad and shows her his response, in large, clear letters.

_TALK TO AMY._

* * *

Kif stays with her day and night. He sleeps in a plastic chair by her bedside, and springs to his feet if Leela so much as twitches in the night. When she surreptitiously worms the IV free, he buzzes a nurse to put it back in. When she feigns sleep, he sits and watches her, not fooled for a minute. It's clear he expects her to be good and wait for Amy to come to her. It's a course of action Leela hates.

A day passes, then two. There is no word from Amy, and no sign of her, which Kif says means Fry is likely still unconscious. According to him, Fry was in major organ failure by the end of the Games. His kidneys had shut down completely and his liver couldn't cope with the strain. Both organs had to be replaced and the poison flushed out of his blood by putting it through a machine. Another machine is breathing for him, and they're feeding him through tubes like the one in Leela's hand.

Kif keeps talking, but after that Leela stops listening. She doesn't want to hear any more, doesn't want to think of Fry lying there like a broken puppet, stuck in whatever artificial existence she saved him for. Kif seems to think he'll wake up, but Leela doesn't trust him. Even the surface can't break a person so thoroughly and put them back together again. It's not possible.

She stops talking to Kif - which he doesn't notice immediately - and stops listening, which he does notice. Leela doesn't care. She turns to face the wall and pulls the covers over her head, blocking him out. In this warm, soft prison, she has nothing for company except the dark and the memories she can't blot out. She relives them, half-dreaming and half-awake, and never knows what will hit her next. Mutts' jaws close on her leg and make-up sweats off her face under studio lights. Rubble crushes her chest and white-clad doctors crack Fry's ribs apart like a rusted hinge, exposing the slick redness inside. Flood water swirls around her legs and Jrr's blood coats her hands and her mother screams at her as the Peacekeepers drag her away - _"No, Leela, no!"_ \- and then Fry smiles and Celgnar screams and blades glint _snick snick snick _in the sun. She kisses Fry again in her sleep, the way she did after the flood, and when she wakes her face is wet and her lips taste like salt, the way he did then, and she realizes she is crying.

She should have done what he wanted in the arena. She should have killed him. A quick death – even the Amphisobian girl was willing to give him that.

But she was so determined not to let the Gamemakers win, and now Fry is suffering for it. They broke him apart and put him back together again with tubes and machines and other people's organs, the human version of a mutt from the Games.

It's all her fault.

* * *

Someone peels the covers back and light floods in. Her head hurts. Her eye stings. She just wants the world to leave her alone.

And then a cool tentacle touches her forehead.

"My baby," a soft voice says. "My sweet baby. What did you do?"

Leela swallows. There is a hard lump in her throat. She can't cry any more, but it won't go away.

"I don't know," she whispers. "I don't know."

* * *

Her mother is a better medicine than anything the surface doctors have to offer. Her presence alone makes Leela feel stronger. More real.

She helps in other ways too, making sure Leela eats at meal times and stopping her from sleeping too much. When the doctors come in to check Leela's vitals, Munda shrinks back into the shadows instinctively, but she always keeps a hold of her daughter's hand. Leela is quietly grateful.

They don't talk about the Games – Kif must have somehow communicated that the room is bugged – and Munda doesn't ask about Fry. She doesn't say anything at all about him, in fact, and if Kif happens to mention him her face becomes carefully expressionless, or she suddenly becomes very interested in Leela's IV line or the flowers on her bedside locker. It's not that she doesn't like Fry – Leela doesn't think her mother has it in her to dislike anyone without good reason – but she is visibly uncomfortable. There is obviously something she isn't saying.

On the third day Leela wakes up to find Kif gone. Amy is sitting by her bed instead. Her mentor is wearing sweats and looks like she hasn't washed her hair in a week, but she is smiling. It softens her face in a way Leela has never seen before.

"Hi, Leela," she says. "How do you feel?"

Leela sits up immediately, ignoring the rush of blood to her head.

"What happened?" she demands.

Amy puts a steadying hand on her forearm. In the background, Leela sees her mother wince. She doesn't need to ask why. Two years' ago, Amy used that hand to slit Moose's throat.

But she can't think about that now, because Amy is still smiling.

"He's awake."

"What?"

"Fry. He's awake." Amy laughs as if she can hardly believe her luck. "He's awake, you're awake! Two of my tributes are _alive!_"

For a second, Leela thinks Amy might actually hug her.

But this doesn't make any sense.

"He can't be awake," she argues. "You're lying."

Amy shakes her head.

"Not lying. He's alive. We just have to keep him that way."

Maybe she sat up too fast after all, because Leela's head is still spinning.

"I want to see him," she says.

Amy suddenly turns serious.

"They're gonna let you both out tomorrow," she says. "Your interview is tomorrow night." She squeezes Leela's hand, a little harder than necessary. "I'll find you," she promises. "We'll talk about it. I'll prep you before you go on, like for your interview in the Games. Remember that?"

Leela nods. She is smart enough to read between the lines. Amy isn't offering to help her with stage-fright. She's going to tell her exactly how to play this to keep both her and Fry alive.

Amy beams.

"Super!" She swoops in unexpectedly and kisses Leela on the cheek. "I haven't slept in like, a week!" she giggles loudly. And - "_Be smart,_" she says under her breath, right in Leela's ear. Then she pulls away, as if nothing happened.

She shakes Munda's tentacle (Leela is impressed when she doesn't flinch) and makes small talk about hospital food (which is better than Leela has had in her entire life, but doesn't impress Amy) and "beauty sleep" (whatever that is), and then she leaves, promising to see them both soon.

On her way out she holds eye contact until the door swings shut and cuts her off.

Leela replays her words again. They were so quiet she could almost have imagined them.

_Be smart. _

She stares at the flowers on her bedside locker. The petals are drying out, turning brown at the edges.

_Be smart._

But she doesn't know this world. She only has the vaguest idea how to play this game.

There is a feeling gnawing at her insides. It's so different from the wild terror she has become used to that Leela doesn't immediately recognize it. But it has the same root, she realizes.

It's fear.


	12. Chapter 12

Leela sits in a pool of gentle golden light, staring at her own reflection. She hardly recognizes the girl in the mirror.

She looks like . . . well . . a _girl_. Fourteen, maybe. She is wearing a dress made of gauzy lilac material that swirls like spun sugar when she moves, and kitten-heeled pumps made of glossy, cream-colored leather. Her hair is up in curlers and her lips are palest pink.

It's not what she expected. She was braced for a dress with plunging cleavage and a thigh-high split, like the one she wore for her first interview. But this is nothing like that. In the last dress Leela looked like a killer, a vixen, a _Victor. _In this one she looks sweet and little-girlish, and about as threatening as a kitten.

That's probably the point.

The human make-up artist dusts blush over her cheeks and then darkens up her freckles so they won't fade out under the studio lights. When she announces that she is done, she doesn't look at Leela.

This is the way it's been with every human she encountered since she left the hospital. They talk to her without looking at her directly – they look at her shoes or her mouth or some point just past her shoulder – but when she turns away she can feel them staring. Studying her.

It makes her miss Fry. At least when he stared at her it was confusing in a way she understood. She doesn't know what these surface people want, what they're thinking when they look at her. (Or don't look at her.) When it happens she finds herself holding her breath, tensed for something she can't anticipate.

The make-up girl is pretty – she has bubble-cut blue curls and a beauty mark shaped like a love heart, and she is wearing a soft denim shirt knotted above her belly button. She doesn't look threatening – doesn't look like she hates Leela or resents her or would rather see her dead. But this is the surface. And on the the surface, everybody lies. The surface have managed to make _Leela _look pretty and non-threatening, after all. For all she knows, this human girl could be a fraud too. If she split her open she might find hate and lies and bloody hands.

It's what she'd find under Amy's pretty face.

_But Amy was in the Arena_, she reminds herself. Amy was twisted the same way Leela herself was. This human girl was never in the Games.

The girl lets down Leela's hair and sweeps the curls over one shoulder, tying them loosely with a scrap of ribbon. Then she spritzes her handiwork with a can of something that makes Leela cough, and -

It happens almost too quick to see. The girl goes to set the can down on the dresser again, but it knocks over another bottle (nail polish remover, Leela thinks). The bottle bursts and some chemical leaks out, splashing over the dresser and dripping under. There is a popping sound, a fizz of failing electronics, and the faint scent of smoke.

There was something electrical under the dresser, and the chemical destroyed it. Was that intentional? It must've been a bug, to listen in on Leela's conversations, and the make-up girl just put it out of commission. Does she know? Did she mean to?

If so, she covers well, dabbing at the spill and babbling _oh no_s as she lifts Leela's dress and shoes out of the way.

Is it Leela's imagination, or does she scrub harder than necessary under the dresser? When she gets zapped with a minor shock she says nothing, just sucks her fingers. Then she disappears, and Leela is left alone.

Not for long, as it turns out.

The door clicks shut behind Amy, but she raises a finger to her lips, signaling Leela to stay quiet while she ducks under the dresser and checks the functionality of the bug. Satisfied it's dead, she straightens up at last and sits down on a nearby pouffe.

The first words out of her mouth are: "How are you feeling?"

"Scared," Leela says truthfully.

Amy smiles thinly.

"Then you're smart," she says.

She is wearing a pastel pantsuit, and her hair has been pulled into a business-like knot at the nape of her neck. Her nails are French-manicured, pink and neat with squared-off white tips. In their last interview she looked merciless, a warrior queen, but for this one she looks like a businesswoman. Austere, maybe, a woman you wouldn't mess with, but not someone who would kill you with her bare hands.

The facade would be perfect if one of her eyes wasn't swollen shut and mottled purple.

Leela swallows.

"What happened?"

Amy shrugs.

"An accident, officially. Unofficially, I had a visitor."

"Who?"

"I didn't get his name, but I know the type. Big guy, black tux. Shades. He mostly talked with his fists."

One of Nixon's goons. Leela doesn't know what disturbs her more – the image of some guy three times Amy's size laying into her, or the way Amy talks about it, like it's not the first time.

"Why?" she asks.

Her mentor picks out two different pots of cover-up and starts mixing them to make a shade that suits her more sallow skin tone. She takes her time answering.

"I'm a mentor in the Games," she says at last. "And two of my tributes survived. Two of my tributes made the Gamemakers look stupid. Two dumb kids. I mean, maybe they did it themselves, right? Maybe they didn't plan it." She looks up. "But maybe they did. Maybe their mentor put the idea in their heads, and even if she didn't . . . it can't hurt to make an example of her, so she won't get any ideas next year. So _none_ of them will get any ideas. Tributes who care is bad enough. Mentors who care?"

She sighs.

"You're smart, Leela. I know you are – I watched you in the Games. You're not like Fry. You _get_ it, I know you do. But maybe . . . maybe you don't understand. And this might be the last time we get to talk without them listening in, so I'm gonna explain everything. And then . . . and then you'll know. And it's up to you what you do with it."

She peels the star chart off the wall and lays it down on the dresser.

"It starts with the story of Earth," she says. "You know Earth, right? The little planet that could." She taps it on the map. "So great at inventing things, and building things, and making things. Like high-rises and humans and guns. Only one day, see, all the big politician people wake up and realize you can't build on _all _the land, or there's nowhere left for food. But if you don't build on all the land, you won't have anywhere to put the people." She smiles wryly. "Kif would call it a logistical problem. So imagine you're President Nixon, and you have this _logistical problem_. Too many people, not enough resources. What do you do?"

Leela frowns.

"Find more resources. Or get rid of some people."

Amy faux-claps.

"Very good! You're already thinking about it the Nixon way. And Nixon does both. He starts by kicking everyone non-human off the planet, and then he slams the doors on immigration. It's the smart choice, right? I mean, everyone agrees. We don't have enough, so we keep what we have for our own." Her mouth twists. "But this is a two-pronged problem, and clamping down on aliens isn't gonna cut it. It's a short-term solution anyway, because _too many humans_ is the real problem, even if no-one wants to admit it. So what next? Well . . . you said it yourself, Leela. Find more resources! And look, there's a planet nearby that has loads of space!" She taps Mars on the star chart. "They're not even using it properly! And I mean, they're not _human_, right, so it's not like they're _real_ people. They'd probably be _grateful_ if some humans came along and taught them how to do things the _civilized_ way."

Amy is unmistakably angry now. There is a harsh note in her voice she can't keep out.

"Anyway," she continues. "Surprise, surprise, the native Martians aren't all that happy about Earth taking over their planet, so they try and fight back. It's not like they have the kind of weapons that would make them a serious threat or anything, but still, they're fighting, and that puts ideas in people's heads. It makes them think maybe this whole Martian venture is a bad idea. So what do you do, if you're Nixon? Well, that's easy. I mean, you already hate aliens. It's not hard to paint all Native Martians as crazy violent monsters, and once you do that, no-one's gonna object when you take harsh measures to subdue them. So. Mars is crushed under your boot. But you still need space, and there are so many little planets like Mars going to waste! There's Venus, and Neptune, and this whole corner of the galaxy." She points out one planet after another on the map. "Only _now _you've got a reputation. You're the guy who takes over planets. You're the Earthican conqueror, and everyone's scared they might be next. So they start arming themselves. But you can't have that. You're Earth! You're the best planet, and you have the best army! I mean, sure, you're stretched kinda thin right now, trying to keep the peace on all these planets you just took over, but you know what your priorities are. You can't let a challenge like that go unanswered. So you increase recruitment to the Army. Conscript some criminals, whatever. And take over some more planets." She points at the Amphibios cluster. "Ones you didn't need before, but now you do, because you're pretty much always at war, and war eats up resources like crazy. Wars take fuel and weapons, so you take over these planets and you open up mines and plantations, you start scooping out rubber and iron ore and methane gas and pumping it all into your war machine, day and night, night and day. And that machine is always hungry. The more you fight, the more planets you conquer, the bigger your army has to be, and the more raw material it needs." Her gaze bores into Leela's. "And it goes on and on," she says. "All these years. On and on and on and on, and _it never fucking ends._"

Leela swallows. Amy's words are painting a picture, filling in details she could only vaguely guess at before. She can see it all now. The pieces are coming together in her head and she can see how connected it is – how Nixon's Freedom Day speeches about Earthican pride start ripples that lead all the way to teenage Kif Kroker being branded on an Amphibiosan rubber plantation, and deciding the only way out is to sign up for -

"The Games," she says quietly.

Amy breathes deep, forcing herself to calm down.

"Yeah. I'm getting to that."

"The Games are there to make it all seem fair," Leela says. She wants to show Amy that she understands at least some of the forces at work here. "The Games exist so humans can pretend they don't hate us. And so everyone non-human thinks . . . thinks we have a chance."

She swallows. It hurts to think of herself signing up for the Games, convincing herself she could kill for a shot at life on the surface. She had no idea what she was doing. Not really.

Amy is nodding.

"Yeah," she says. "The Games are about making it seem fair. And they're about reminding everyone who holds the power now. If Nixon can toss a bunch of kids into an arena and make them fight to the death, and make people _cheer_ -"

"He can do anything."

"Exactly." There is silence for a beat, before Amy goes on. "The problem," she continues, "is that the Games are a weapon. They're a weapon of fear, of control . . . you know. But a weapon only works if you have control over all the parts. Otherwise it can blow up in your face."

"That's what me and Fry did," Leela says, feeling nauseous. "We blew it up in his face."

Amy stares down at her hands, which are balled in her lap.

"Not exactly," she admits. "I mean, you did. You totally did. But you couldn't have done it if I hadn't fucked up first. If Nixon hadn't fucked up first, with me. He let a human into his precious Games. He set the precedent."

She smiles. It's a hard, mirthless smile.

"I won and people cared, and none of that was supposed to happen, not ever. You and Fry didn't cause this, Leela. But you took a flamethrower and aimed it at a stash of dynamite, and now _all _the bets are off."

Leela frowns.

"Wait. People weren't supposed to care about you in the Games? But . . . you're human. Nixon must've known people would want you to win."

Amy looks up again, takes in the honest confusion on Leela's face. She winces.

"Oh. They don't tell you the ugly details in the sewer. Ohh-kay . . ." She sighs. "I'll tell you the story then. Once upon a time, a long time ago – before Nixon was the paranoid nut bar he is now – he was just a regular amoral, war-mongering nut bar. And he was best friends with my dad, who was, like, an amoral, greedy whack-job, basically, so they were pretty much well-matched. Nixon gave my dad governorship of Mars, and my dad gave Nixon millions of dollars to invest in his armies, and everything was sweet. For a while."

"What happened?"

Leela has heard rumors, of course, that Nixon was jealous of Leo Wong's wealth. But there were so many rumors in the sewer, and most of them were just guesses in the dark. Amy's expression suggests there was more to the story.

Amy spritzes perfume on her wrists, avoiding Leela's gaze again.

"There was this woman," she says. "Carol Smother. She was like, a business mogul. She was in Nixon's set with my dad. She had factories everywhere, making all kinds of stuff. Weapons and genetically-modified food and junk. The war made her nearly as rich as my dad. And then she came up with this idea – or one of her scientist guys did, I don't know." She inhales sharply. "Robots. She started making robots."

"What?" Leela frowns. Robots are an urban myth. Aren't they?

Amy doesn't bother to clarify.

"My dad invested in the project," she continues. "And then Nixon found out and he shut it down. He had everyone who had anything to do with it killed."

"Why?"

"Why?" Amy laughs. "Leela, Momcorp was building _a robot army_. Oh, sure, she said they'd all be programmed to follow Nixon . . . but what if they weren't? Robots don't need to eat or sleep, they can't feel pain, you can program them not to desert or have doubts . . . I mean, that's not just an army. It's the _perfect army_, and it wasn't in Nixon's hands. That wasn't just a threat. It was practically treason." She chips at her perfect fingernails. "Maybe that was the point. Maybe Smother and my dad really were planning some kind of coup. I don't know. I never got to find out. Momcorp's factories burned down overnight. All her prototypes were destroyed. Her head of R&amp;D and a bunch of workers died. There was a gas explosion at her mansion the same night. Her and her husband and her two kids all died. They say there was nothing left of them to bury, even. Just . . . y'know. Teeth. Skin fragments. Hair." She shudders. "The next day our hovercar came back from the shop with the brakes cut."

Amy's eyes go blank, her expression far-away and empty.

"We crashed," she continues. "My mom and dad were killed instantly, but they cut me out of the wreck. That was the first fuck-up. I was supposed to die too, but I walked away without a scratch on me, like a freaking miracle, and then Nixon had a better idea. He could've killed me in the hospital after, but he thought it'd be smarter if he made an example of me. So he sent one of his goons to lay it all out for me: get worked to death on Halley's Comet or sign up for the Games." Her hands are trembling. She stills them with effort. "I was supposed to die, again. I was this fat, clueless little kid, and I was up against real fighters. I should have been dead meat. But I figured it out, I figured out how to get people to like me, how to make them feel sorry for me, how to be _sneaky_. And I won." She smiles. "That was when Nixon realized he was in trouble. People were supposed to be too scared to sponsor me. I was supposed to be too scared to fight. But it all went wrong, and suddenly people were watching and thinking he'd gone too far. They were starting to question him for the first time, on _Earth_, on his own turf. So now he had to step lightly, or he'd have an uprising on his hands."

An uprising. The thought sends a thrill of terror through Leela.

Amy takes her hand, nails digging into Leela's palm.

"I was just a kid when I won," she says. "I didn't understand how it all worked. The power I could've had, if I wanted it. I let them dress me up and pump me full of silicon and sell me out to anyone who wanted me on their arm. I was scared. I let them turn me into their _thing_ . . ." She shakes her head. "I let the moment pass. Everyone did. But all that feeling . . . Leela, it's still there. You and Fry, you woke it up."

"I didn't want to wake up anything," Leela says numbly.

Amy drops her hand.

"You hate him as much as I do," she retorts. "I can see it in your face. Leela, you can't even hide it."

Leela swallows. She can feel panic knotting in her stomach.

"Well, I want to hide it! I don't want to seize the moment. I don't want to be . . . whatever the hell you want me to be. I didn't survive the Games to get killed in some phony house fire, Amy. I just want all this to be over. I want my mom to be safe. I want Fry to be safe."

The words sound pathetic – plaintive, even – hanging in the air between them, but they're true. Leela might hate Nixon, but that hate isn't worth seeing Fry or her mom hurt over.

Amy's face becomes pitying.

"Leela . . ." She hesitates, then sighs. "It's _never_ over. The people you love won't ever be safe. I'm sorry. But that's the way it is. As long as Nixon's in charge, he can do what he likes with any of us." She takes Leela's hand again. "I'm not trying to scare you, and I'm not trying to get you killed. I swear."

"Then what _are_ you trying to do?"

"Right now? I'm trying to keep you and Fry alive. You're my tributes."

Leela tugs her hand away, annoyed. She can feel her old self surfacing again - the prickly, ungrateful mutant girl she really is. The girl who didn't have time for friends, because all they ever did was pull her away from her goals.

"Then tell me how to stay alive," she snaps.

* * *

**A / N: We're given a first name for Mom (Carol) in the Futurama universe, but not a surname. Larry, Walt, and Igner do go undercover as owl exterminators at one point though, and the name on their van is "Smother Bros". Without anything else to go on (and given that it was a typically lazy disguise from them) I decided to just go with it as a surname. **

**I'm planning to do sequels based on Catching Fire and Mockingjay, but for this story, the next chapter will be the last. It's been a fun ride, people!**


	13. Chapter 13

Backstage is cool and dark. Leela waits for Linda to call her name, waits for her cue to join Fry and Amy in front of the cameras.

Her heart is pounding in her throat. Her palms are sweating so much she wants to wipe them on her dress. She would too, if Amy hadn't warned her it would leave a mark.

The acoustics back here are off. They distort Linda's trill tones and shallow laughter, bounce them around like dice in a cup, and Leela's heart is bouncing too, because any minute now she'll have to get up on that stage and give the performance of her life. Any minute now she'll see the truth of what they did to Fry in that hospital.

She's not ready.

No-one cares.

"And now for the moment you've all been waiting for!" Linda's voice booms. "The reunion of our historic _joint_ victors! The star-crossed lovers whose cross-species romance captivated us all: _Philip J Fry and Turanga Leela!_"

A man dressed all in black appears, holding a clipboard. A cigarette dangles from his lower lip, and voices are squawking from the headset clipped to his ear.

"That's your cue," he says. "Gets out there, mutants girl."

He puts a hand square between her shoulder blades, and shoves her out into the lights.

The heat is ferocious. Leela can feel sweat beading on her forehead, can feel her dress sticking to her waist. She wants to throw up.

There are two red couches facing each other across the stage. Linda is sitting on one of them, smiling inanely. Amy sits next to her, legs delicately crossed. The purple swelling around her eye is visible even from here. There is a clear foot of space between the two women, and Leela could analyze that, could look for meaning in it, but then her eye slides over and all she can see is the boy standing in front of the opposite couch.

He's thinner than she remembered. His hair has been combed back from his face and he's wearing white – a stark, startling white that reminds her of hospital bedsheets. But he's standing on his own two feet, a bouquet of white roses clasped in one hand, and Leela can't see a scratch on him.

He doesn't look like Fry. This boy – clean and whole and unmarked – _can't_ be Fry. Fry is a boy who bled out on dirty ground, whose torn fingernails dug into her palm when the two of them made their final pact. He lay limp on the operating table when the doctors cracked open his chest, not even breathing. He was _broken_. He wasn't this Fry. This Fry has the unreal quality of a television star; the kind of sterile, pristine perfection that suggests he was just pried out of his packaging. He doesn't look real.

Maybe he's not. Maybe he's some kind of mutt, or clone, or something. Who knows what they really did to him in that hospital?

Leela takes a step, and then another.

Fry smiles at her. Or at least, she guesses he smiles at her. His mouth twists upward and he half-raises the bouquet of roses, but the distance and the glare of the studio lights make his eyes look blank, and it gives her chills.

She takes another step.

And then -

"Hi," Fry says, like they just met at breakfast or collided in the stairwell. Like they're not The Star-Crossed Lovers of this year's Games. Like the last time she saw him he wasn't technically _dead. _

It's so stupidly, blithely oblivious it couldn't be faked. The Gamemakers would never script something so awkward.

Then he tugs at his collar with his free hand, the way he always does when he's nervous, and -

It's him. It's really him.

Leela hits him with her whole body, driving the air out of his lungs. Fry makes a little "oof" of surprise and staggers back, but he doesn't fall. His arms come up around her instead, and then he's holding on like to let go would be to drown.

The audience goes nuts.

Leela doesn't notice. She doesn't remember running across the stage. She can't think.

Fry's face is buried in her hair and he's mumbling against her neck - "Leela" and "I missed you" and "Leela" again, the words bubbling up and falling over each other. Either he's happy or he's so overwhelmed his brain has short-circuited and he's just babbling at her. Leela doesn't really care. She's busy running her hands over him, assessing the damage. She can't feel any scars or bandages. There are no damp spots where he's bleeding through his clothes, no hissed intake of breath when she touches the site of his wounds. She tugs his shirt open at the neck, looking for the place where the throwing-star hit him, or the vertical line the doctors cut into his chest. She finds nothing. Sure, the skin is new and pink-looking, but he's not the Frankenstein's monster she was expecting. He seems -

"Le - Leela?"

Fry breaks into her thoughts, his voice unnaturally high. Laughter roars all around them, thundering in her head, and Leela suddenly remembers that they're standing in front of an audience. And she just tore Fry's shirt open.

"I -"

She lets go quickly and takes a step back, trampling his flowers. He must have dropped them.

"I had scars," Fry says. "But they came this morning and lasered them all off."

Leela nods dumbly. She's not sure what to say.

Desperately, she reaches for the advice Amy gave her.

_Show them you're not a threat. Show them you're just a stupid kid who was so crazy in love she didn't want to live without her boyfriend. Act your ass off, and maybe Nixon won't kill us all. _

She needs to play the love-struck teenager. To convince the world her actions in the Games were stupid, not subversive.

Instant wound-inspection isn't romantic. It's the behavior of someone still in the arena, someone still planning and assessing, focused only on survival. And she hesitated too long before she ran to Fry. That wasn't romantic either.

She looks at Amy, silently appealing for help.

To her surprise, it's Linda who saves them. The interviewer turns her insipid smile on the cameras and _aww_s.

"Oh, don't be shy!" she coos. "You can kiss him. We can all see how much you want to!"

Kiss Fry? In front of everyone? Leela feels her cheeks burn. Some combination of anger and disgust flares up inside her. She can't just kiss on command, she's not -

But they're staring at her. A thousand pairs of eyes and at least six different camera lenses. It's worse than the hidden cameras in the arena – so much worse – but she doesn't have a choice.

So she swallows back how violated she feels and forces a smile instead, hoping the flush in her cheeks looks like embarrassment. She fixes the buttons on Fry's shirt and takes a deep breath. Then she shuts her eye, leans forward, and presses her lips to his.

She intends to just hold them there, to ride out the cheers and hide how sickened it all makes her. But Fry pulls her in and kisses her back with more enthusiasm than she expected, and she forgot how this felt, forgot the heat of his mouth and the fluttering feeling that unfurls in her stomach, and the way his presence grounds her when she feels like she's about to break apart and scream.

She gives into it.

Fry knows what he's doing. He's better at this than she is, which doesn't make any sense – his life was even more devoid of romance than hers, until the Games – but it's instinct for him in a way it isn't for her. Maybe because he doesn't think so much. It's a cruel thought to have about someone she cares about, Leela knows that. But that doesn't mean it's not true. To love someone the way Fry does takes a special, short-sighted kind of recklessness. He can give her everything and make it seem simple, because for him, in the moment, it is. He's not capable of holding his feelings for her and the truth of the Games and the need to lie in his head all at the same time, so he chooses to hold onto the one he thinks is most important.

If they were both like Fry, she thinks, they'd both be dead.

But if they were both like her, they'd probably be dead too. The only reason this kiss is halfway convincing is because Fry cares more about her than about the tightrope they're walking.

Which is why one of his hands is now fisted in her hair and the other has settled too low at the small of her back, and his teeth are tugging at her lower lip in a way that is unmistakably hungry.

This is why she can't be reckless too, Leela thinks bitterly. She has to be cynical, has to stay half-outside the moment. Because now Fry is being _too_ convincing as a teenager who is crazy in love and almost died, and that's not what the Gamemakers want. They wouldn't have dressed her in this little-girl outfit and made Fry give her flowers if they wanted the audience to think this thing between the two of them is physical.

It's supposed to be a love story. It's supposed to be a fairy tale.

So she disentangles herself from Fry and blushes as furiously as she can. It seems to restore her innocence in Linda's eyes – the blonde goes from looking shocked to laughing uproariously with the audience. Amy allows her a tiny, approving nod.

Fry looks bemused – then realizes what he was doing and who he was doing it in front of, and burns bright red. "Sorry," he mouths at Leela.

The real Leela would wave this off and tell him to just cool it in front of cameras next time. But the lovey-dovey Leela the Gamemakers want could never be so short with her boyfriend, so she takes Fry's hand and squeezes it instead – a gesture she hopes will hit the sweet spot between forgiving and bashful. It seems to work for the audience, but a faint frown line appears on Fry's forehead and stays there as they sit down.

He knows her better than she thought.

But that's a concern Leela can't deal with right now, because the screen behind them has come to life, flashing lights, and a drumbeat is pounding in her ears.

Linda is talking in the direction of the cameras.

"We'll be interviewing the lethal lovebirds later, so stay tuned for that! But first, let's remind ourselves how they got here."

They're going to recap the Games.

Fry tightens his grip on her hand, like he's drowning again, and Leela doesn't even try to pull away. The sick feeling has returned. She wants to run, to melt away somehow or shut her eye.

It starts off okay. Linda recaps the contestants for the audience, briefly profiling each one. Then there is a segment where the mentors are asked to evaluate their new tributes. Leela hasn't seen this before, but she's not surprised when Amy calls Fry "sweet" and predicts he'll make an alliance to survive in the arena. Or that Amy's assessment of her is "hard to figure, but definitely one to watch".

This is followed by some shots of the tributes in training, and then the interviews, which have been heavily edited. They use a different camera angle and mostly stay close on Leela's face, keeping the plunging neckline of her dress out of shot. She talks about her mom and what an honor it is to be in the Games, but everything else from her interview gets cut. Fry fares even worse. His interview was a disaster no amount of artful editing could save, and it shows. He walks out on stage, tells the story of how he wound up in the 31st Century, and is cut off before he even gets to his comments about the orphanarium. A handful of highlights from the rest of the tributes are crammed in after that, to make it look less conspicuous, but the damage has already been done.

No-one who saw the interviews the first time round is going to forget what Fry said. _Fry_ can't forget what he said. He starts tugging on his collar again, palpably nervous. It takes a sharp look from Amy to make him stop.

Linda recaps the odds and walks the audience through the specifics of this year's arena, and then . . .

_TEN. _

_NINE. _

_EIGHT. _

The countdown.

Leela freezes, cortisol racing through her system.

_She's on a podium, cold sunlight blinding her, and if she moves before time she'll be blown sky-high. If she moves too late, the other tributes will rip her limb from limb. _

_Look around, look around, notice everything. _

_SEVEN._

_SIX._

_FIVE. _

_The Cornucopia is gleaming in the sun. Food. Weapons. _

_Get ready. Now. Now. _

_FOUR. THREE. TWO. _

_Fry is twenty feet away from her. Closest to the Cornucopia. _

_Too close. He'll be a target. He can't fight._

_She's not supposed to care. _

_ONE. _

_The cannon cracks and her world explodes. There's a knife in her hand and she can't remember how it got there, doesn't care, because everything is blood and screaming and . . . blood . . . and if Fry didn't run fast enough some of the blood is his, but she can't think about that now, can't think about anything . . ._

Something touches her ear, and Leela snaps back to herself.

Her whole body has gone rigid. The tendons are standing out in her neck. She's forgotten how to blink. The screen in front of her is showing the bloodbath at the Cornucopia. There's a soundtrack, and the audience keep whooping.

And then she realizes the person touching her ear was Fry. He was twisting one of her curls around his finger, gently tugging on her ear lobe. Trying to bring her back, before the cameramen noticed she was gone.

She blinks, and he smiles.

"Hey," he murmurs.

"I'm okay," Leela murmurs back, trying not to move her lips.

Fry doesn't say anything, just nods.

Leela feels a sudden surge of affection for him – a warmth that makes her feel more exposed than she did when he was kissing her. It's strange and disorienting. She doesn't know what to do with it, so she pushes it away and sits up straighter, forcing her attention back to the screen.

The bloodbath has ended and the Careers have set up camp at the Cornucopia. The Gamemakers are now cutting between scenes of Leela's breakdown and the other lone tributes. Fry makes his alliance with Jrr. There is infighting among the Careers. The highlight reel gathers pace, as the Gamemakers leap between events Leela witnessed firsthand and footage she has never seen before. The evisceration of the Decapodian boy is just as grisly the second time around, but the sight of the mutts attacking Fry and Jrr is a fresh horror that quickly drives it out of her mind.

Next to her, Fry's heart rate sky-rockets as he watches the mutts close in on him on the screen. Leela is still holding his hand and she can feel the pulse jack-hammering in his wrist.

She squeezes his hand. Fry squeezes back, so hard his knuckles glow white.

_Don't look, _Leela thinks desperately. _Don't look, it makes it worse_.

But he can't look away. And she can't either.

The mutt's jaws close on his leg and it throws him. It tosses him ten feet at least and he lands hard – and unconscious. He doesn't see Jrr rip into the mutt with his teeth. He doesn't see his friend start to eat the thing's raw flesh.

But the real Fry – the one sitting beside her - sees it now. He bends forward abruptly, dry-heaving, and Leela tightens her grip on his hand. She's not sure what the Gamemakers would think if Fry threw up in the middle of his victory interview, but it's never happened before and it seems safer not to risk it.

Behind them, on the screen, the action moves on. The Amphisobian girl is burned by a pod of exploding acid. The Careers lose most of their food to another one. Fry's temperature rises higher and he becomes dehydrated, which the Gamemakers discuss dispassionately.

When the building collapses on her Leela looks away, unwilling to relive the experience. But Fry leans closer. Her hand is still in his, but it's like he's forgotten he's holding it. He watches, apparently bewildered, as they are reunited onscreen. As Leela works to bring down his temperature. As they talk about dead family members and receive parachutes, and as Leela and Jrr talk about _him_. His feelings for Leela, his friendship with Jrr, the need to keep him alive whatever the cost. He watches it like it's all new information – which to him, it probably is. Not just the conversations Leela had with Jrr while Fry slept, but their own interaction too. Without fever and blood loss clouding his mind, it all looks different to him.

He can see it for the first time. He can see the connection between their romance and the sponsors sending them food and medicine. He can see Leela's stiffness and discomfort as she tries to play this game, the way she holds back and calculates each move ahead of time.

His frown tells her he's figured it out at last. She used his feelings to keep them alive, and now he knows it.

His fingers twitch and he pulls away from her. Not by much. The cameras might not notice it, but Leela does. She tightens her grip, tries to pull him back, but it doesn't work. His hand sits in hers like a caged animal.

He won't even look at her.

Leela keeps her grip on his hand, keeps her expression neutral, because the cameras are trained on them both and she can't afford to stumble – can't afford to be anything other than a girl in love. One of them has to keep up the pretense. Hurt and confusion are written all over Fry's face. The hurt is obvious when screen Leela clumsily manipulates him into a kiss – but then she kills Jrr to save him, stops him from drowning, stays with him when he starts bleeding to death. She leads the mutts away from him when he falls unconscious. Crawls back to him with the burnt skin peeling off her hands and refuses to win without him. Leela tries to imagine how it all looks to him, what he must imagine her motivation to be.

On the screen, they're being air-lifted out of the arena. For the first time since the highlight reel began, Fry doesn't seem to be thinking about anyone else. Leela, Jrr, and the tributes they killed are all driven out of his mind by the sight of his own lifeless body. Leela realizes too late that this, too, is new information to Fry, that he doesn't remember what happened to him. He doesn't know what's coming when the whine of the bone saw starts up.

Leela grabs for his hand again, desperate to stop him seeing it, but she's too late. The medical team crack open his chest. The cameras zoom in on the immobile muscle of his heart. And in the present day, Fry's eyes roll back in his head and he slides off the couch with a _thunk_.

* * *

It's unprecedented. No Victor has ever fainted while watching their own highlight reel. It causes pandemonium, and when it becomes clear Fry can't be immediately revived, the entire interview has to be cut short. A clip show – _Ten Most Memorable Deaths _or _The Glorious History of the Games_, something like that - goes out instead, and Fry is spirited away to his room to recover.

Leela is permitted to return to her old Tribute suite, where she's been living with her mother.

Food is sent up to the suite, and another stylist comes to undress her. The fact that this stylist takes away her dress and shoes, and leaves her with only thin silk pajamas to wear, doesn't escape Leela's notice. She could try to run but she'd freeze on the streets, if she didn't cut her feet open first.

Even if she could run, where would she go? The whole world knows her face. Her door unlocks from the inside, and her hands are free, but Leela is under no illusions. She's a prisoner.

If Munda has similar thoughts, she knows better than to voice them. She rhapsodizes about the food instead, and tries to get Leela to sample each dish. Warm goat's cheese and slivers of strawberry on a bed of baby leaves. Lamb balti with fluffy white rice. Buggalo ribs in a sticky honey glaze. There is more food here than two people could eat in a week. Leela picks at a salad, sickened by the extravagance of it all, and then pleads tiredness, so her mother will let her go to bed early.

She knows she won't be able to sleep, but it feels like rest when she pulls the covers over her head. Not being watched, not having to talk to anyone, not having to look at anything but the dark behind her eye . . . that feels like rest.

Hours pass.

The food is taken away. The lights dim. Her mother goes to sleep.

Leela lies still, waiting.

The alarm clock on her bedside locker is glowing a sickly green – 02:37 AM – when Fry knocks at the door. The sound is soft – his knuckles barely bruising the wood – but Leela is up in an instant. She crosses the carpet and opens the door, tugging him inside before the camera can sweep the corridor again.

She puts a finger to her lips and Fry nods. He's still wearing the white suit from his interview, though it's wrinkled and dirtied from the floor. Obviously nobody felt like removing it while he was unconscious.

Leela pulls on two pairs of bedsocks, one on top of the other, then tiptoes over to where her mother is sleeping and snatches up Munda's lumpy home-knitted cardigan from the arm of the couch. Her mother snores on, oblivious.

They slip out of the room while the camera is facing away from them. Leela doesn't think they'll make it down the corridor before it pans around again, but it turns out they're not going that far. Fry only hustles her the two steps across from her own door, then pushes down on an innocuous section of wooden paneling on the opposite wall. The wall slides apart at his touch, then he and Leela step inside and it glides smoothly back into place.

They are standing in a dimly-lit stairwell. The walls are padded and the carpet under Leela's feet is so thick she sinks in it up to her ankles. In here, all sound is muted – as they start to climb, Fry's dress shoes are as silent as Leela's socks.

She can smell old food and spilled cleaning products. This is the staircase the staff use, she realizes. They have a whole set of corridors the maids and cleaners use so they won't cross paths with the tributes. The Gamemakers pretend their gleaming Tribute Center runs on automatic, but this is the reality behind it - people scurrying about like rats inside the walls.

It creeps her out and she unconsciously climbs faster. When Fry pushes open the escape door to the roof, cold air blasts in and makes her shiver.

They're on top of the Tribute Center. Leela can see the heli-pad the hovercraft take off from, far away to the west of the building. Here on the east side though, there's nothing to see. Just a warren of vents belching steam from the kitchens floors below. Fry tugs her forward, into the maze of vents, and Leela warms instantly. The air here is moist and swampy, and between the creaking of the vents and the clanging noises from the kitchens, it's hard to hear. Which is perfect, she realizes. A bug wouldn't last five minutes up here. Intentionally or not, Fry has found the one place the Gamemakers can't listen in on them.

She curls her toes up inside her socks, bobbing back and forth on her heels. Up here, alone at last, she doesn't know what to say to Fry. He's tugging at his collar again, avoiding her eye, and Leela suspects he doesn't know how to break the silence either.

She coughs.

"Did Amy tell you to bring me up here?"

Fry blinks.

"No. I just wanted to talk to you alone somewhere, before we have to go on TV again. I thought we should. Talk, I mean. About the Games, and everything_. _Us, I guess."

Leela pulls her hands back into her sleeves and balls the fabric into fists. She feels exposed in the cold night air. The sky above them is black and clustered with stars. When she looks up she feels dizzy, like she's falling into it. The stars in the arena weren't real, she realizes suddenly. That sky was just a projection. Anyone who had ever seen the real night sky would have known it – it has a density the one in the arena couldn't hope to imitate.

The real night sky – the endless, unfathomable depth of it – is faintly terrifying.

"Leela?" Fry touches her elbow. "Um. Can you . . . can you say something? That would be great."

Leela swallows.

"I don't know what to say," she admits. "I don't know where to start."

Fry chews his lip.

"You were faking it," he says at last. "In the arena. All that love stuff . . . you were faking it to get us sponsors."

Leela nods. She doesn't trust herself to speak.

Fry gives a stiff, jerky little nod of his own.

"That's what I thought," he says. "I mean, that's what I figured. When I watched it back." He shoves his hands in his pockets, staring miserably at the ground. He laughs. There is no humor in it. "You saved my life though. Those sponsors got us food. Medicine. They healed your wrist, and they made me better when I was sick." He hesitates. "I think it was worth lying, for that."

"I never . . . I never meant to hurt you." Leela stumbles over the words. "I wanted to keep you safe. I owed you that."

For the first time, Fry looks confused.

"You didn't owe me anything," he says. "What would you owe me for?"

Leela stares at him.

"You came to find me," she reminds him. "In the arena, after that building fell on me. And -" - heat surges into her cheeks - "- you let me take that medicine for my mom. From your orphanarium. When we were kids."

They've never spoken about it out loud before. Sometimes she wonders if Fry even remembers.

He shrugs.

"You needed it," he says simply. "Your mom needed it."

As if the world he comes from would ever see it like that.

"And I came to find you in the arena," he continues. "It's not like you asked me to."

Leela gives up. Sometimes Fry behaves in ways that contradict everything she knows about the human race. And arguing about it doesn't help her make any sense of him.

She settles for saying something honest instead. Fry might not agree, but she _does_ owe him that much, at least.

"I would have died without you."

Fry laughs. It comes out sounding weird and strangled, but it's still a laugh.

"Leela," he scoffs, "I watched it back, remember? You were just saving me, over and over again. I must be the most pathetic Victor in history. I got shot, I got mauled, I nearly drowned -"

"You made people like me," Leela interrupts.

"What?"

"You made people like me. Before you came to find me, no-one cared about me. I wasn't interesting. The love stuff . . . it made me interesting. It kept me alive."

"Then it kept me alive too."

Fry can be stubborn when he wants to be. Leela had forgotten that about him.

"Fine," she says, somewhat churlishly. "It kept us both alive."

"Okay."

"Okay then."

They stare at each other.

Fry breaks eye contact at last and sits down, pressing his back against the metal of the vent in an attempt to get warm.

"Are you cold?"

She's aiming for normal, but the question comes out sounding sharp. They're not in the arena anymore, Leela reminds herself. She doesn't have to be hyper-aware of every drop in Fry's temperature.

Fry doesn't seem to mind though. He just shivers.

"I feel cold all the time now," he admits. "Since . . . you know." _Since I almost died._ He doesn't have to say it. "The doctors said I'm fine," he continues. "But it's like . . . it's like I don't remember how to be warm. It's stupid."

"It's not stupid."

Leela sits down beside him. Her shoulder is pressed against his and their arms are touching. Despite what he says, Fry feels thankfully, blessedly warm. The cold must exist only in his head.

There is another long silence, but this one is less awkward. It feels more like a rest – a recovery period they both need before they find the strength to tackle anything else.

Leela tilts her head back, staring up at the sky.

"I forget," she says softly.

"Huh?"

"I forget." Her fingers knot around each other. Her throat feels dry. "You feel cold all the time? I _forget_. I wake up sometimes and you're not near me and I think -"

Her voice falters.

When Fry reaches for her hand, she flinches. He goes to pull away, but -

"Don't."

The word is hoarse and quiet, little more than a whisper. Leela isn't sure how it escaped her throat. It happened too fast for her to stop it.

To her surprise, Fry's hand finds hers again. He unknots her worried fingers and winds his own around them.

"So what happens now?" he murmurs.

Leela sighs. She feels tired all the way down to her bones.

"We pretend," she says wearily. "We pretend we're in love. Pretend we're just two stupid teens who don't know how much trouble we're in."

Fry looks at her.

"We don't have to."

"We don't have a choice," Leela rebuts. "If we don't do what the Gamemakers want – what Nixon wants – he'll kill us. Or kill everyone we care about. Kif, Amy, my _mom_. We have to protect them, Fry."

"But – he can't do that," Fry says uncertainly. "We're Victors."

Leela doesn't know how to respond to that. The truth is that yes, their status as Victors affords them some protection. But there's no way to be sure of how far that goes. If President Nixon wants to kill them, their popularity won't stop him. He'll turn the public against them, make it look like an accident, _find some way_.

Eventually her silence seems to answer Fry. He swallows.

"What if we can't do it? What if -"

Leela grips his hand tightly.

"We don't have a choice," she reminds him.

There is another long silence.

Fry doesn't say anything but she feels him nod, and the action eases some of the tension in Leela's chest.

"Are you going back to bed?" he asks at last.

"No."

"I don't want to."

"Me either."

"Maybe . . . maybe we could stay here for a while. We could look at the stars. Uh, as friends." Fry shoots her a hopeful, sidelong look. "I could tell you their names. I bet they never taught you about stars in the sewer."

Leela looks up again, lets herself fall up into that dizzying, endless black sky.

This moment matters. She can feel it in her jangling nerves, in the part of her that suddenly wants to run. But she can't do it anymore. The old her would have turned Fry down, but the new Leela is too altered - too damaged by the arena and everything after - to push him away. She can keep him at a distance, but she'll never be able to sever this bond between them.

So why is she fighting it?

She lets her head fall onto his shoulder. Swallows past the lump in her throat.

"I'd like that."

* * *

**A / N : That's it, folks! This story ends here. As this AU is based on the Hunger Games book trilogy, there are going to be two sequels following the outline of Catching Fire and Mockingjay. They'll be posted as new stories. The working title for the next installment is Glory and Gore and the rating should be T, so if you're not one of the people who has me on Author Alert, keep an eye on the main fandom page. I'm hoping to start posting within the month. I work two jobs though, so I might not get it up as quick as I'd like. **

**Before I go - I want to say a huge, huge thank you to everyone who stuck with this story, especially the anonymous reviewers I couldn't reply to, and all the people who took time out of their day to leave me really detailed, in-depth feedback. You're super, and I appreciate every one of you. :)**


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